Information Literacy: An Outline
by James Green
What is Information Literacy?
Information Literate people understand more than how to find information: they also understand its limitations, how to validate it, how to manage it, and how to communicate it safely and effectively. Because everyone relies on information everyday, Information Literacy is now an essential lifelong skill. Information Literacy empowers the learner to engage with, validate and apply information resources to enable effective and safe acquisition of knowledge.
An Information Literacy programme
The Internet is a key to future economic well being, life long learning and a sense of “self” in a global community. Information Literacy therefore supports all the key areas of the Every Child Matters agenda. Increasingly students need to be skilled in understanding, validating and manipulating information on the Internet to support their own learning pathways.
A significant amount of thinking and understanding in this area has come from the international speaker and visionary, Alan November. Further documentation and resources are available on his site
The basic principle of Information Literacy is for the learner to develop the skill, understanding and practice of using appropriate Internet functions to validate unfamiliar information. The “5 Ws and 1 H” approach is a useful routine to support validation of Internet information. This in turn supports the “learning to learn” agenda and helps to develop skills and competencies that encourage the learner’s journey towards deep learning.
5w's and 1h
We should ask ourselves these six questions:
Who has written this website?
What is it about? Is it factual? What do you know by reading the url?
When was the site last updated? Is it recent enough to be valid?
Where does this information come from? Where does this site link to?
Why will this information be useful? Why has the author written this?
How good is the Information?