Information Literacy

From the session with Stu on January 22, I came away with a very useful concept; one that has helped provide renewed focus for much of my instruction. His definition of Information Literacy as the ability to find, authenticate and share information was extremely useful. If we want students to be life long learners, we must provide them with the skills to achieve that goal.
If students can’t envision how ideas can be personally beneficial, they often aren’t interested. As teachers we need to show them how to be good consumers of the Internet’s information. Students need to realize that with all the information available, they can be their own teachers. If they want to know how to do something, they can find the answer, providing they have good information literacy skills.
Hooking students by using the technology the way they are using it, may help – but as teachers, we must prepare them for the future. A future where applications like Google Docs may very well replace the mainstay applications like Word and Excel, but students must know the basics of how to format documents properly. They need to know how to create a table of contents, have the ability to create sections in a document so they can format the sections differently. Business students and students involved in research need to know how to create, manipulate and read spreadsheets and charts. A good understanding on creating databases is invaluable to organize information.
A good number of recent graduates from our school have told me how well prepared they were for their post-secondary education. Much of their introductory material was a review of what we had done in class. Hopefully post-secondary instructors will promote information literacy, ensuring that everyone will be a life long learner.

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