Browsing by Author "Louw, Gerald"

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    Extending boundaries: team teaching to embed information literacy in a university module
    (UNISA, 2020) Bharuthram, Sharita; Mohamed, Shehaamah; Louw, Gerald
    In today’s knowledge-based economy, the role of universities in preparing students to be information literate and independent thinkers and researchers is crucial. Information literacy (IL) skills enable students to become research-oriented, hold critical approaches to knowledge, be critical thinkers, consider things from different perspectives, develop their own ideas and defend and share these in an ethical manner. University students are often expected to access, process, evaluate and synthesise information from a number of sources in order to complete their assessment tasks. To do this efficiently, they need to possess good IL skills. This article postulates that students’ IL skills can be successfully fostered and enhanced if academics and academic librarians enter into a partnership to collaboratively develop students’ IL skills. The article discusses an intervention at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa that entailed embedding IL skills in an academic literacies (AL) course offered to first-year students in the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences. This intervention involved a partnership between academic librarians and an AL lecturer in adopting a team-teaching approach to collaboratively develop students’ IL skills. Overall, students showed great enthusiasm for the IL sessions, and their responses to the different tasks given to them were positive. The partnership between the team members was found to be successful.
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    The use of mobile technology as a search tool for information: the case of the University of the Western Cape Library
    (Univeristy of the Western Cape, 2024) Louw, Gerald
    Mobile phone usage is part of the daily lives of students and library staff. Therefore, it will impact how library information resources are accessed. Libraries will have to accept the changes because the mobile environment demands change. This research investigates the use of mobile technology as a search tool for information at the University of the Western Cape Library. The research adopted the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model as its theoretical framework. The study used a mixed-method design. The research method was a web-based survey questionnaire collecting quantitative (mainly) data from undergraduate library users. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect qualitative data from librarians. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences was utilised to analyse quantitative data and generate a thematic analysis for the qualitative data.