Information literacy crisis?

Awhile back I wrote about declining information literacy with regards to many bloggers/reporters who were carelessly attributing a quote to Albert Einstein, one which he may never have said. Last week Shawn at Anecdote posted about students in his class relying solely on wikipedia and google for supporting their theses. Jack Vinson has a nice analysis of this, thinking it might have something to do with information overload. Last year I saw a study that found this same disturbing trend.

The problem as I see it is that people don’t really know what information literacy is, they get confused about what skills are involved. Many people think they are information literate when they are not. Jack also mentions the “good enough” problem where people often settle for something that’s good enough, even if it’s not ideal. But all of this adds up to a real information literacy crisis.

What is information literacy:

There are many different definitions of information literacy floating around. I’m going to give you the definition I work under which sufficiently vague to encompass a great many concepts surrounding information literacy. Information literacy is the ability to locate, analyze, and apply information to solve a problem.

Here are some guidelines on what I think does and does not constitute information literacy:

• Information literacy includes traditional literacy (reading, writing and verbal communication skills).
• Information literacy includes the ability to judge the authority of information (website, author, article, blog post,etc.).
• Information literacy includes the ability to find information in any format (electronic, print, multimedia).
• Information literacy IS NOT the ability to find what you’re looking for on Google.
• Information literacy IS NOT about technology skills. Being able to IM, create web pages, navigate the web efficiently, does not make you information literate.

Information literacy skills:

It doesn’t really matter what model of information literacy you use to teach these skills. Big 6, Kuhlthau’s model, whatever, all these models while slightly different can still get you to the same place. They all involve some variation on the steps below:

• Define the question – How can you find the answer you’re looking for if you don’t even know the question. Many librarians will tell you that people often are not aware of what they’re looking for. They ask questions which obscure the actual problem they are trying to solve.
• Planning – generally there is a stage where you plan your search strategy. Think about what you’re looking for, and where that information is likely to be hiding.
• Location – run your searches, find your information.
• Examining/Analyzing - reading through your information, analyzing what you’ve found.
• Organizing/Presenting – create a bibliography, write a blog post, a mind map, put printouts in a binder, but you must hold on to that information somehow.
• Evaluation – Some process where you decide whether your problem is solved.  If it’s not you need to start again.

Every information search should involve some variation on the above steps. It’s ok, for example, not to hold onto any record of a search for something quick and easy (there might be no need for organization/presentation).

The most important steps are, in my opinion, defining the question and analyzing. Like I said earlier, if you don’t know what the question/task/problem is and what will solve it, then no amount of google-fu will help you. Similarly if you can’t analyze the objectivity/accuracy of an article then whatever information you find is tainted, and can always be bettered by someone who has these skills.

There might be a lot of people out there with great tech skills, who know the web better than anyone, maybe they even have some great traditional literacy skills… But that does not make them information literate.

UPDATE:

Infomancy had an interesting post this week about “information fluency” in New York. 

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