21st Century Literacy: Information Literacy
Over the past few weeks I’ve been highlighting the importance of contemporary literacy and 21st century skills. Basic Literacy describes the knowledge and skills necessary for success in the digital age. Visual/Media Literacy addresses the need to be able to communicate by nonlinguistic means. Our next topic, Information Literacy, examines the challenges of manipulating and managing the vast quantities of information at our disposal.
A Whole New Meaning
As with the other literacies we’ve explored, Information Literacy is not a new concept. The issue did not come into national prominence, however, until the 1989 Presidential Committee on Information Literacy Report from the American Library Association. Their definition of Information Literacy is perhaps the most commonly cited and easily understood:
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 information literate individuals are those who have learned how to learn.
While this definition is nearly 20 years old, it is still applicable today and is not substantially different from those being applied in other countries. The challenges of locating, evaluating, and effectively using information in the 21st century, however, give the definition a whole new meaning.
Information Abundance, Relevance, Reliability, and Richness
Abundance: We live in an age of information abundance. The technology firm IDC determined that the world generated approximately 40 exabytes of new information in 2007; that’s approximately 300,000 Libraries of Congress. This summer, Google announced that it had indexed one trillion unique URLs and estimated that the web was growing at a rate of several billion pages per day. Locating information is not the problem; locating relevant, reliable information is the real issue.
Relevance: For many students, the Internet is a familiar yet overwhelming space. Of the several hundred million searches performed each day, many (and quite possibly the majority) are done without any degree of sophistication. Students must be taught how to formulate effective queries, both in terms of how to search and where to search. If they are to truly learn how to access relevant information, their toolkit must be expanded to include resources beyond the World Wide Web.
Reliability: In this post-Gutenberg economy, where we publish and then filter, the task and importance of evaluating information has never been greater. Anyone can publish anything, and with complete anonymity. While this may not mean the death of culture as some would assert, it does mean that students need to learn to be discriminating consumers of information; they can no longer equate published with reliable.
Richness: Applying credible information to simplistic problems does little to foster literacy. Students must be given opportunities to investigate rich questions that require multiple resources, promote deep thinking, and help students “learn how to learn.” Only by going beyond that which can be Googled will our students develop Information Literacy in the modern sense.
Next Steps
To move forward, we must reconsider our approach to information abundance, relevance, reliabiity, and richness. Information problem-solving strategies such as The Big6 can useful in framing the research process, and we must be intentional in guiding students through the processes of locating, evaluating, and using information effectively. Tomorrow will bring a few billion more web pages and several thousand new books; it would seem there is no time like the present to get started.
