What [do you know/can you find out] about information literacy?
Prior to this class, I did not really have any knowledge about information literacy. However, through an assignment from early in the semester, we read a few articles and discussed what information literacy was. From that assignment I recall that information literacy basically relates to how you obtain and use information. In order to find how to become literate in a digital society I had to conduct some research on the subject. First, I found that information literacy, according to the National Forum on Information Literacy, is the ability to locate, evaluate, and effectively use the information for whatever the specific purpose may be. The next website I found, S.O.S for Information Literacy, was very interesting to me because it was soley dedicated to educators to help them teach information literacy to students. Such things like different helpful links and lesson plans are offered on the site. Information litearcy is a dynamic concept and very valuable to us as college students.
What are your reactions to the idea that there are certain information skills?
I completely agree that there are certain skills that a person must possess in order to be information literate; especially in the digital world. I specifically have encountered this with my own family. I would consider my sister and I to be the most information literate people in my family. My father, working at a phone company, often with DSL, knows quite a bit about the internet, however my mother is definitely the least information literate of us all in the digital world. Because finding information on the internet requires certain skills like knowing where to go to access information, how to access the information, and then how to use the information I can say with quite certainty that everyone in our family has tried to teach my mom these skills at least 3-5 times each. I think this demonstrates the fact that there are certain skills people must possess to be information literate, especially in a digital world. I also feel that this can be attributed to a few different things like the differences in generation and how often you actually use the internet.
How do you think this “new” literacy will change education/schooling?
I believe that this new literacy is and already has changed education/schooling. Before people had computers and the internet, people primarily obtained information from journals, books, libraries, etc. Since the invention of all of the new technology, people can never even leave their homes and still have access to all of these same resources simply through the use of the internet. I feel like this “new” literacy will continue to grow in schools at a very rapid pace. Students have more access now to information than 20 years ago, so I can only imagine what technology will allow students to do 20 years from now. In schools today, any student who does not have access to the internet is probably at a great disadvantage compared to their classmates.
