I found this concept about what information literacy is: “Information Literacy is the ability to identify what information is needed, understand how the information is organized, identify the best sources of information for a given need, locate those sources, evaluate the sources critically, and share that information. It is the knowledge of commonly used research techniques.” The link (webpages.uidaho.edu/info_literacy/ ) from the University of Idaho, also shows some slides to educate people about the topics above, including searching, locating, evaluating and sharing I think this is one of the main set of strategies/skills we need to teach people from their early ages. More important now than ever, with so much information coming from different sources... In the past, this teaching would permeate all education: when we learned and practiced reading, we were asked to find the title, author and editorial house, as well as main ideas. We were also asked to summarize, paraphrase or quote and for each project, we were asked to research. It was part of the curriculum to look, read and select appropriate information from libraries and different sources (including interviews with real people) and in most cases, we would have to prove the author’s credentials by researching whether this person had the authority to write about the topic. When the Internet started, I used to implement a module as I run a computer lab at a local school back in Venezuela. The module included five criteria: authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency and coverage: olinuris.library.cornell.edu/ref/research/webcrit.html and we encouraged students (both elementary and high school goers) to provide evidence that supported each one of the above criteria. Unfortunately, this has two sides we may want to be careful with: on one hand, we have an almost obsession with quoting “authority” (i.e. APA style citing) which may curtail learners’ ability to be creative and express their learning and thoughts...sometimes journals and essays are so full of quotes that they become too boxed and difficult to read, with dry content and we barely can distinguish the learner’s learning process from the stiff results. On the other hand, without these skills, learners may become too lax and rely on anything they find on the internet, books, etc without any criteria tool to check whether the information is real and trustworthy. By Silvia Diblasio PIDP 3240
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 05:27:06 +0000
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