As a young child I was puzzled by mum’s excitement about buying a World Book encyclopedia. Nor did I understand her passion for updating the encyclopedia each year when the Year Books arrived. I took access to encyclopedias and dictionaries for granted because we had them at school. But for mum instant access to information at home was an exciting new experience. Mum grew up on a farm a few miles from town. She left school at 14 without going to high school and joined the airforce as a transport driver when she turned 21.
While we say, ‘Let’s Google it!’ Mum said, ‘We’ll look it up in World Book.’ Mum explained that updating the World Book was like updating the airforce officers’ service manuals. The meticulous annual update kept the encyclopedia current. I thought she was very patient and very clever, a master of information. So it came as a complete surprise to me when, years later, while we were visiting the Council library, she asked me to explain to her how the card catalogue worked. I had just assumed that she would know, because I knew. In the 20 or so years since she had left school, information practices had left her behind.
A few decades ago, it was enough to be literate, now we have to be multi-literate — information literate, technologically literate, digitally literate. This highlights the need to develop understandings about the nature of information, and the systems for organising, retrieving and disseminating information. It also highlights the need to foster an awareness of the speed with which such practices can become obsolete, and how to constantly update our information practices.
Bruce, 2004 states that information literacy is a “natural extension of the concept of literacy in our information society”. She believes that since the early 1970s, information literacy has developed into the “critical, overarching literacy for the twenty-first century”. It is “inextricably associated with information practices and critical thinking in the information and communication technology (ICT) environment.” So the apparent difference between ‘literacy’ and ‘information literacy’ is the application of literacy to ICT environments.
Information and communication technologies are rapidly evolving and becoming increasing complex. Learners engage with new forms of information and new information environments as part of their everyday experience. Bruce believes that this makes information literacy pivotal to lifelong learning, personal empowerment and economic development — the catalyst for transforming the information society of today into the learning society of tomorrow.
However, Shapiro and Huges (1996) pointed out that information literacy is “an often-used but dangerously ambiguous concept”. They raised a number of important questions about the nature of information literacy, how it should be promoted and how it might be accomplished.
Is information literacy about the technical aspects of information and communication technology; about becoming effective information consumers; about the ability to adapt effectively to technological change; or about thinking critically about “information enterprise and information society"?
Shapiro and Huges (1996) go as far as to propose that information literacy might be an emerging "liberal art" — “part of what it means to be a free person in the present historical context of the dawn of the information age”. They conceive it as encompassing computer-know-how, the ability to access information and “critical reflection on the nature of information itself, its technical infrastructure, and its social, cultural and even philosophical context and impact” (Shapiro & Huges, 1996). They believe that information literacy is not only as essential to an educated citizen of the information-age as grammar, logic and rhetoric were to an educated person in medieval times; but necessary to the future of democracy (Shapiro & Huges, 1996).
References
Bruce, Christine S. (2004) Information Literacy as a Catalyst for Educational Change. A Background Paper. In Danaher, Patrick A. (Ed.) "Lifelong Learning: Whose responsibility and what is your contribution?", the 3rd International Lifelong Learning Conference, 13-16 June 2004, Yeppoon, Queensland. Retrieved August 19, 2011, from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4977/.
Shapiro, Jeremy J. and Hughes, Shelley K. (1996). Information Literacy as a Liberal Art: Enlightenment proposals for a new curriculum. EdCom Review. Sequence: Volume 31, Number 2, March/April 1996. Retrieved August 9, 2011, from http://net.educause.edu/apps/er/review/reviewarticles/31231.html.
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