My session title was "Five Rules for Becoming a Computer Genius: OR How to Make Information Literacy Relevant to Middle School Students". I based it on the rules introduced here in a previous blog post. I was fearful that what I would talk about was old news to fellow teachers but was surprised to find that many did not know about things like Boolean search strategies or better-than-Google sources on the Web. A couple of session attendees commented that they wished they had had a class when attending college that dealt with how to use search tools ... or that there had been someone to show them the 'tricks' for finding great information. My background in libraries has probably given me an insider's view of some of this but I was taken aback by the overall lack of support that most of my colleagues received in the information/research process.
What hit me hard was the realization that our use of technology in education for finding information (and, if we are honest, most other sorts of applications too) has been pretty much a failure to this point. There has been no - or very little - instruction on the very basic tools and strategies needed to utilize the information we have at our disposal. We as educators are trying to get a grasp of the mass of information out there and also trying hard to make it usable in our teaching ... but it's a struggle when you've never been taught how to do it ... or more importantly, WHY to do it.
That experience has started me thinking in a deeper way about information literacy and I've been looking at articles, blogs, and Twitter posts (Twitter ID - ljhardin) in my own attempt to get a handle on how to approach the issue with both teachers and students. A few things of interest:
Joyce Valenza Ph.D - posts a blog through School Library Journal. This recent post deals with the "human based search tool" called Finding Dulcinea.
On finding Finding Dulcinea March 17, 2009
Call it a response or a backlash or an adjustment. Something is going on in the search world.
There's a growing recognition that we need more than Google, we need to reach beyond the limits of keyword search to make sense of a crowded, media-rich information landscape.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334/post/1090042109.html
The following is a link to a study dealing with young people and information literacy/searching located when I did a search on 'information literacy' using the 'Sweet Search' in Finding Dulcinea. Go to the link to read a '30 second summary' and find a link to the full study available for download:
Young People Not So Tech Savvy After All
May 21, 2008 07:45 AMby Finding Dulcinea StaffThe “Google generation” might have grown up using Internet technologies, but experts say they don’t know how to conduct effective Web searches.
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/technology/March-April-08/Young-People-Not-So-Tech-Savvy-After-All-.html#1
Jamie McKenzie publishes a monthly newsletter dealing with technology and information literacy among many, many other topics. This article in the March issue of FNO (From Now On) deals with some of the basic "literacies" students (and staff!) must have to be information literate.
Reading Across a Dozen Literacies By Jamie McKenzie
Reading?
We need a broadened conception of reading to capture the many different types of reading that occur when considering information in different formats across different media. As mentioned in the companion piece to this article ("Reading Between the Lines"), students must now be able to "read a face" as well as a page, must be able to read a photograph or a chart or a situation. Reading as understanding applies to many aspects of life.
http://fno.org/mar09/dozen.html
