I started teaching Masters students while doing my PhD, and began teaching professional development courses while a practitioner. As an academic, I have been able to focus on postgraduate education for the information sciences, while continuing with professional development education. Latterly, the challenge has been to find a good solution for the education needed for information specialists amid the disruption of the move to the infosphere and onlife. My ideas on the content of the information syllabus, as of 2022, are summed up in the second edition of my co-authored Introduction to information science.
I taught on the former CityLIS postgraduate programmes at City University London for over thirty years, including being programme director for Masters courses in Library Science, Information Science, Pharmaceutical Information Management, and Information Management in the Cultural Sector. I have taught most subject on the CityLIS curriculum, focusing on theories and concepts of information and of LIS, aspects of knowledge organisation, the ethics of information and data, research methods, and subject-specific information and documentation. I have also tried to push back against a rigid module diet by introducing independent study and integrative studies. To show the diversity of research carried out by CityLIS Masters students, a static list of the topics which I supervised is shown here.
I have taught courses at the University of West London (formerly Thames Valley University), and at University College London, and been visiting lecturer at the University of Ljubljana, and guest lecturer at the universities of Universities of Zagreb, Prague (Charles University) and Dublin (University College). I have been an external examiner for taught courses at Sheffield, Loughborough, UCL, Brighton, West London and Edinburgh (Queen Margaret).
Internationally I co-directed a summer school for library/information specialists at the Central European University in Budapest for five years, was a group leader for the LIS-EU project to develop a European curriculum for library/information science, and was involved in the development of a MOOC for information literacy instruction.
I have carried out professional development training for a number of organisations, including the British Library, Aslib, and CILIP. I believe that academic and professional education should be better integrated, and that both should have a strong theoretical and conceptual grounding.
Some publications on my education work are below, including some older ones to show changing concerns.
D Bawden, “Never again the in the history of humanity”: information education for onlife, Keynote paper presented at the International Symposium of the Future of Education in Information Science (FEIS 2018), Pisa, September 2018.
L Robinson and D Bawden, International good practice in information literacy education, Knjižnica (Ljubljana), 2018, 62(1), 169-185.
L Robinson and D Bawden, The story of data’: a socio-technical approach to education for the data librarian role in the CityLIS library school at City, University of London, Library Management, 2017, 38(6/7), 312-322.
L Robinson and D Bawden, Information (and library) science at City University London: 50 years of educational development, Journal of Information Science, 2010, 36(5), 618-630.
D Bawden, L Robinson, T Anderson, J Bates, U Rutkauskiene, and P Vilar, Towards Curriculum 2.0: library/information education for a Web 2.0 world, Library and Information Research, 2007, 31(99), 14-25.
D Bawden, Facing the educational future, Information Research, 2007, 12(4), paper colise01
D Bawden, Information seeking and information retrieval: the core of the information curriculum ? Journal of Education for Library and information Science, 2007, 48(2), 125-138.
L Robinson and D Bawden, Distance learning and LIS professional development, Aslib Proceedings, 2002, 54(1), 48-55.
L Robinson, R Kupryte, P Burnett and D Bawden, Libraries and the Internet; a multi-national training course, Program, 2000, 34(2), 187-194.
The Occasional Informationist 