In today’s small group discussion regarding the definition of all the different forms of literacy, our group decided to divide and conquer in our quest to find definitions around the term “literacy” and “technology” and how different school boards and departments of education were dealing with these ever-evolving entities. I chose to focus on finding a suitable and what I hoped to be current definition of “information literacy.” As many of our students do when we send them out to find relevant, reliable, accurate and trustworthy information, I stumbled across this article written in 2004:
http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla70/papers/059e-Campbell.pdf
Sandy Campbell was someone I had never heard of before today. I’m glad that I landed upon this article she published almost 10 years ago. The definition of information literacy she chooses to base her paper on is “the most generally accepted definition of information literacy that one finds in the literature…by the American Library Association in 1989” and is as follows:
“To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information.”
The question I put to my group and in the discussion forum was whether or not we felt this definition still applied to today and our answer was a resounding yes. In my role as a teacher-librarian and a classroom teacher, I realize more and more that I need to be both the learner and the guide all at the same time as I navigate through the abundance of information available to me and my students online.
The discussion forums in this class are an accurate representation of the above definition of information literacy. We all realize that we need information to explore the various topics we are presented with and then we set off to locate it, quickly evaluate it and then attempt to use it effectively in our classroom and online discussions. For many of us, it is most certainly information overload to accumulate so many links and connections in such a short period of time. We then have to sit back and sift through all that has been strung together and decipher which pieces are most relevant to us and to the particular question we are trying to answer, investigate the authority behind the information, determine whether this information is current and covers our topic. We, as teacher-librarians and educators, must guide our students to critically evaluate the abundance of information they too will stumble upon and equip them with the skills, knowledge and resources to undertake this continuous task.
When we talk about information literacy, we are generally focusing on our relationship to information – how do we find it, how do we assess it, how do we make sense of it, how do we store it, etc. That is definitely a library-centric view of information and speaks to the historical role of libraries. A great challenge we are facing, as a knowledge-era society is how we make sense of all the information that is available. In my educational research and studies, I have a few hard copy books on my bookshelves, I have over 3,000 references in my bibliographic manager. Some of them have pdf files attached, some just have an abstract. At first, I was completely overwhelmed with the amount of information I was finding, and there was new information everyday! Now I have realized that I can only know as much as I know, and work to discern the most valuable information of what I can access. This is a necessary skill for all of us as we learn to learn in the knowledge era.