Information literacy (???)

Even before I began my master’s program a few years ago, I was very interested in information literacy–particularly in how people learn how to find and make sense of information… I’ve always felt adept at locating relevant information quickly and efficiently, but, in the same way that I don’t remember actually learning to “touch type” quickly, I don’t remember formally learning information-seeking processes. It just seems to have always been there. I’m sure I’m failing to acknowledge the many great teachers I had growing up who taught me other things about how to discern quality information (and, in fact, maybe that’s a hallmark of good instruction — that it’s now so ingrained that I don’t remember not being able to do it… i don’t know).

Since so much of the Information Sciences program was aimed at helping create “Information Professionals” who know how to organize, access, and disseminate information (typically on behalf of other people, and typically while serving in a librarian-type capacity), I know stuff about search strategies and locating good sources, but I’m not sure of the best ways to help relay such information to others in a brief enough, easy-to-use enough format… As we’ve talked about in class, part of the joy of Web 2.0 is its user-friendliness — that people don’t have to understand how to program (X)HTML/CSS code in order to blog, they can just sign up to a free service and write essentially wysiwyg-style — Just like people shouldn’t have to know how to create a query using command-lines in formal information retrieval databases just to find out who wrote a particular novel. But then again, if the title of the novel is “Dog,” then they should probably understand that Googling the word “dog” is likely an inefficient search for the information they’re seeking.

In various courses and outside conversations, we’ve discussed much about how students don’t necessarily have to memorize dates and facts, because those are likely to remain the same regardless of what else we learn, and those can be looked up easily– it’s the deeper stuff, the how-to, critical thinking-type stuff, that students need to learn.  And, despite my previous post in which i professed my love for Sporcle and other trivia fun (which is still totally true), I generally agree with this assessment.  But how do we do it?  By what means do we teach information literacy?  How do we assess someone’s ability to locate and evaluate quality information in a timely manner?  I try to stay away from the “everything’s relative” sentiment, but surely it factors in somehow…   So many questions…

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