13 - Improving information retrieval with dialogue mapping and concept mapping tools

Summary

Introduction

Development of education practices and new education methods are increasingly important in Finnish universities. There is pressure because of internationalization and quality targets with no extra funding are to be expected. This can also be seen in training organized by the library.

The Library of Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) has almost 40 years’ experience in teaching information retrieval. In these years several course models have been used and thousands of students have participated in the training (Palmgren and Heino, 2002, 197–207). The Bologna process (named after the University of Bologna, where the Bologna declaration was signed in 1999) aims to create a European higher education area by 2010, making academic degree standards and quality assurance standards more comparable and compatible throughout Europe. This has changed the situation at TKK and new courses have had to be planned. The library now has its own part in the student's seminar programme, where instruction has been planned to ease the writing of the thesis; for example, students undertake an exercise to search for information on the topic of their thesis. Library training reaches all students twice: at the beginning of the studies and then at the thesis writing phase.

Because the groups are large and the time to be used is limited, learning environments and other methods to ease tuition are being used. There is also less room for face-to-face teaching in the schedule (Heino and Palmgren, 2006).

In order to reach the goal of information literacy, students have to apply the basic skills they have learned in the library courses to their actual studies. TKK teachers are in a vital position, and so new training for teachers has actively been planned as a part of their pedagogical training. The new course presented in this paper combines different competences and allows for co-operation between different fields of knowledge within the university.

Mapping methods are being used for structuring the information search. Maps are known to be a good method for outlining things in general; however, piecing together information-searching exercises is difficult. When students receive the topic for their thesis they are often lost; they do not know about the topic, or how to search for information.