Anne-Vinciane Doucet

Measuring students' information skills through concept mapping

This paper seeks to develop a methodology that will discover, specify and measure students’ abilities and skills in creating concept maps. Because competencies are the key factor in higher education, the paper analyzes the role of concept maps as a tool to diagnose and improve information analysis, synthesis, organization and representation skills and competencies. We propose a methodology that enables these skills to be evaluated by observing, analyzing and measuring the stages involved in creating a concept map: identification of the main and secondary subjects; subject codification by concepts; grading of concepts; and representation of the concepts and their relationships with labels. A case study using action research methodology tests its usefulness on a group of university students of library and information science. The method proposed provides information on the strengths and weaknesses of the students’ skills, thus enabling their training to be improved by means of specific actions.

The role of information competencies and skills in learning to abstract

The ability to abstract information is a basic competency in todays knowledge society, characterized by the mass diffusion of information and the need to manage and access it effectively. Yet abstracting is not an easy task, and requires a specific learning process. This paper examines the process of abstracting information from the perspective of competencies and skills-based learning of students of information and documentation. The competencies and skills necessary in this process, which are drawn from European sources on library science and documentation, are identified by analysing in detail the various stages and processes involved in writing an abstract. The general skills required for the whole process, as well as the specific skills for each stage, are determined. Guidelines and recommendations are put forward to facilitate the learning of these skills in the context of abstracting.

Information provided by Spanish university websites on their assessment and quality processes

We analyze and evaluate the information provided by Spanish public universities on the web about their assessment and quality processes with the aim of detecting aspects for improvement and identifying best practices in universities that could act as a benchmark for the rest of the sector. A tested model/template incorporating a set of criteria and indicators is used to determine the quality of this information. The strengths and weaknesses of institutional websites are analyzed at both individual level and as a whole; the possible relation between website quality and the characteristics of the universities is also examined.

An educational resource for information literacy in higher education: Functional and users analyses of the e-COMS academic portal

As in today’s knowledge society the Internet is playing an important role in the information literacy of university students the goal of this paper is to analyse, after its first year on the Web, the informational impact of an e-learning resource developed by Granada’s University lecturers (the e-COMS educational portal), a pioneer in Spain for training in information literacy. From the objective and subjective data provided by the own portal and by it users, two different and complementary kinds of analysis (functional and users’) are performed. Assessment of various capabilities, among which visibility and usability stand out, is provided. The highly positive but improvable results offer a detailed analysis of the functional aspects of the portal itself and of the users’ relations with this information resource. From these analyses strengths and weaknesses are extracted and some proposals for improvement are derived.

Metric analysis of the information visibility and diffusion about the European Higher Education Area on Spanish University websites

The purpose of the study proposed in this paper is to evaluate the Spanish public university websites dedicated to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). To do so, the quality of these resources has been analysed in the light of data provided by a series of indicators grouped in seven criteria, most of which were used to determine what information is made available and in what way. The criteria used in our analysis are: visibility, authority, updatedness, accesibility, correctness and completeness, quality assessment and navigability.All in all, the results allow us to carry out an overall diagnosis of the situation and also provide us with information about the situation at each university, thus revealing their main strengths, namely authority and navegability, and also their chief shortcomings: updatedness, accessibility and quality assessment. In this way it is possible to detect the best practices in each of the aspects evaluated so that they can serve as an example and guide for universities with greater deficiencies and thus help them to improve their EHEA websites.

La descripción de las imágenes en Internet a través del análisis de 30 bancos de imágenes

This article analyses the description of 30 environmental image banks on the Internet. After a short definition of the image banks, documental representation, image retrieval and metadata (EXIF and IPTC), I will analyze various factors to determine the existence (or non-existence) of normalization in caption image: the global profile of image banks and the components of image details, as well in its terminology as in the frequency of use of these components.Furthermore, I will analyze the caption has a label in the image detail or not, and its size (words, phrases, paragraphs), the frequency of use of metadata and finally, I will present documental tools and retrieval presentation.This analysis allows us to conclude there is a large variety of documental description of images on the Internet.