Information Literacy

Information literacy is a skill that everyone needs to possess to be able communicate and survive in today’s technological culture. It has become more important over time as the internet has shifted to a web 2.0 format. People are not just passive users of the internet but contribute to the internet and continuously interact with each other. People not only need to know how to critically analyse the information they look at but need to be able to create and upload information that is has been sourced using their information literacy skills.

I have to admit my information literacy is not that good. Until recently I have only really used Google and Super-Search (UWA journal search engine) to find my information and my search stings for looking for information (key words) are often limited. For my future research I will endeavour to use meta-search engines like Metacrawler and Dogpile to help broaden my search and take a range of mediums to get a better view of my topic.

I think it is extremely important to start to teach students this concept as early as possible. It doesn’t have to be a specific, explicit lesson on information literacy but continually mentioning the concepts throughout their learning. When students are a bit older and have to start to produce research project, I think students would have to be given an explicit lesson on information literacy. I think one of the reasons my information literacy is not that good is because as a young student most of my research was done by using books in a library and I was never taught the principles of information literacy or the premise of search engines. The sites shown in class such as the “Save the tree octopus” website http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus would be such an interesting idea for a lesson on informational literacy. Actually showing students that websites are not always correct would be a good starting point.