Information Literacy

Twenty years ago, college students did not have to worry about being informationally literate; in fact, they probably wouldn’t have even known what that meant. If a student reads their books and understands the information in the text, is that informationally literate? Not quite. Present day college students have access to a whole other universe of information beyond their textbooks and what their professors say in class: the internet. The internet is a crazy resource, to think that you could access the knowledge to anything you want to know with just a few pokes and slides of your finger is something that no other generation of people were lucky (or cursed?) enough to have. I’ve never seen Spider-Man, but with great power, comes great responsibility which is why the American Association for Higher Education released a manifesto about how institutions should approach this new and otherworldly resource to foster an even stronger learning environment. According to the manifesto, information literacy is important because it supports a student’s motivation for lifelong learning; just because you are graduated from college, there is nothing stopping you from continuing to infinitely learn, especially when you have access to something like the internet. However, before this can take place, a student needs to be properly taught how to navigate the internet and essentially manipulate it to get what he/she wants from it which is part of the curriculum that universities are beginning to implement into their courses. “The sheer abundance of information will not itself create a more informed citizenry without a complementary cluster of abilities necessary to use information effectively” which should be exposed in higher education, if not earlier in a person’s life (ALA 2). This is the very reason why not everyone with a smartphone is a brilliant thinker because having the information at your fingertips is one thing, but the ability to use it is another which is why information literacy should be taught to children in primary school because even if a person doesn’t end up going to college to receive a higher education, they still have the ability to learn on their own.

In his book, The Uses of Digital Literacy, John Hartley states that digital literacy is important because it democratizes knowledge which goes along with the idea that learning should be accessible to all people regardless if they are formally receiving an education or not. In the first chapter, Hartley compares literacy to the countercultural uprisings of the 1960’s to explain how information shouldn’t be trapped inside of a system and that the digitalizing of literacy can be the break from this exclusive system where information only used to be circulated within a limited landscape (i.e. higher education). The internet opens up these barriers for all to have the opportunity to learn and become self-actualized if they were previously shut out from the stringent boundaries of older systems.