250: information literacy

What are the big ideas and unspoken assumptions of information literacy? Look beyond the skills - how are we conceptualizing information literacy (you may want to break it down). What are the unstated biases guiding the way we discuss information literacy - in terms of standards. If you were teaching a course that focused on information literacy what are the overarching understandings you would want students to have at the end of the course?

With the advent of the Internet, the explosion of digital media, and the increased accessibility to and reliance on these outlets of information, the nature of literacy has changed. When I think about literacy, or information literacy, I see a broadening of these ideas to include a whole host of new skills and strategies that didn't need to be taught before, because they simply didn't exist. As a K-12 person, I focused my thinking on the AASL standards (which I think Sir Ken would love, don't you?). I appreciate these standards because when we start talking about this big, expanded ideas about information literacy, it feels hard to me to distill those big ideas down into meaningful, applicable standards that can guide our practice as librarians.

I think it's notable that skills are only one of the learning goals outlined by the AASL standards. Not only do we want students to understand concepts at a basic level, or be able to repeat back information (perhaps this is the "knowledge" level we discussed in our last round of posts), but learners need to be able to think abstractly and critically about information, to be metacognitive and self-reflective, and to apply what they've learned to new situations (that's the "understanding" piece).

Information literacy is about connecting with information. Information literate people can locate information they need using a variety of tools, can critically evaluate that information for accuracy, bias, and relevance to their learning needs. They can "read" a variety of information, in a variety of formats (by "read" here, I mean not only reading in a traditional, decoding sense, but decode, take it in, understand it, ask thoughtful questions, and think abstractly). There are so many new technologies to learn to read (I still can't read twitter. What's up with all of those #s?).

This week I thought a lot about how we teach students to navigate different sources of information. I think there's much less of a divide in young people's minds between "good" or legitimate information (textbooks, peer reviewed articles, reference sources in a library) and "bad" or less legitimate information (websites, their friends' Facebook page, etc.). Our job, I believe, is not to adhere to a rigid hierarchy about "good" and "bad" sources, but to help students learn to choose and evaluate sources appropriately, given the learning task at hand. To me, that is true information literacy.

A short example: last night, I was reading my daughter the book The House That Jack Built. There's that line, "This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built." My husband and I started wondering what malt is, exactly. After activating our prior knowledge ("Malt is in Whoppers, right? Those are tasty), I googled "What is malt?" and landed on a definition-- at everyone's favorite questionable source, Wikipedia. My husband said, "But is Wikipedia real information? Can't, like, anyone just get on there and write whatever?"

My feeling is, yes, it's real information (I'm hoping Bruce would back me up here), and it's a reasonable source for our information needs. If I wanted to write a dissertation, or any sort of academic paper about malt, I wouldn't use Wikipedia- I'd find a more reliable source. But in the moment, for a quick answer, it worked fine.

That's a long, rambling story, to illustrate the point that I think one of the biggest ideas in the world of teaching information literacy is that the information is out there, and students need to learn how to match the appropriate information with the task at hand.