I really don’t think anybody mortal really understands how big the information literacy puzzle truly is. On occasion I get glimpses of it, like hiking around a giant mountain in swirling clouds, but it remains mostly obscured. For most of my career I feel I’ve been loking at a few trees and calling it a forest:  this is how you build search strings, this is how to save links, organize information, synthesize it and report results.

But really, information literacy is what learning is. The closer we get to pure inquiry learning, the further we get from seeing it as something added on to a unit. Information literacy  is at the core of inquiry and constructivist pedagogy. It underwrites all action and problem solving.  For any student to take action, learn authentically, or explore and solve complex problems,  they must be able to ask relevant questions in the proper scope, know where and how to look for information,  abstract ideas from data, formulate hypotheses, synthesize knowledge, report findings and follow-up on the feedback.  This is learning how to learn, and this should be our top priority as educators.

My school is undertaking an important project around information literacy that aims to carry out a fairly straightforward action plan.  More and more,  however,  I feel we need to take a more critical look at how learning itself is changing in parallel with information literacy.  We can’t from one side of our mouths say that digital technologies will revolutionize learning and yet layer 20th century information literacy processes down on top of it and hope that it fits.   We need to look at the many new ways that humans can inquire and learn about the world and develop activities that support learning how to use these tools.

How do you support information literacy skills in your classroom, library, or school?