Information Literacy

Information literacy is the most important development in education over recent years. The change is a simple one- students find out how to find information and evaluate its validity rather than learning a series of "facts".

The understanding of information literacy has developed with the internet. However, most writing on the subject has been aimed at either businesses or the Higher Education sector. As a 11-16 classroom practitioner I am dealing with students who have never had any time without the internet- the first wen sites appeared when I was at university in the early 90's- I as most adults am at a distinct disadvantage.

My first exposure to the concept of information literacy was several years ago when Edexcel introduced their DiDA course. Here was a fully web literate qualification developed with the specific goal of enabling students to become "power" users of ICT. DiDA was good but flawed. The qualification involved you having to use ICT to create every piece of coursework and this had to eb included in an "e" portfolio- however, one of the secrets of information literacy is knowing when not to use computers and when other methods will be better.

I am currently writing a scheme of work involving introducing learners to the new internet- blogs, wikis, aggregators, rss and the like. I realised I had to do this when I found that I could no longer update wikipaedia entries from the school network- apparently so many students had tried to corrupt existing entries that wikipaedia decided that they were not going to play ball- understandable really.

I am hoping that this will aid students learning in a real way and develop information literacy skills that they will be able to use.

At the same time, I think it is our duty as educators to reassess what we mean as literacy. I would see information literacy as a higher level skill than simply spelling or grammar and could be used as a framework for the other two. This will involve a new set of pedagogy's for teaching literacy and a massive amount of upskilling for educators.

What do you think?

(try typing information literacy into Google- and see what you get!!!)