Teaching Information Literacy Skills in the 21st Century

While these articles were both written with academic librarians in mind, their findings are useful to anyone attempting to teach information literacy skills to students of all ages. The first article (Bent & Stockdale, 2009) discusses the importance of preparing university students with critical information literacy skills not only to help them through school, but in their later careers. They demonstrate how much more effective information literacy instruction is when integrated into the curriculum rather than as unrelated one-offs in the library. The authors also emphasize the importance of incorporating self-reflective activities like learning logs to support student awareness of and engagement in their own information practices.

In the second article, Adolphus suggests best practices and specific examples and guidelines for teaching information literacy skills online through the use of tutorials, podcasts, and games. Here are those guidelines:

• Navigation should be intuitive and easy to follow.

• Think about the design and make the tutorial visually appealing

with graphics, color, and appropriate fonts.

•Avoid too much text on a page and chunk text to break it up,

for example, by bullet points.

• Content should be at an appropriate level, neither dumbed

down nor too complex to be understood.

• Use interactive exercises where appropriate: Students like

them, and they help consolidate learning.

The Storygame project developed the following guidelines

for developing information literacy games.

The games should accomplish the following:

• Contribute usefully to coursework

• Concentrate on mastering one key concept

• Count towards a grade

• Provide an opportunity to see others’ research

• Offer both positive and negative feedback

• Allow an individual to take control, even though the game

is played by a team

• Provide a payoff for leaving the computer to research print

resources

• Foster opportunities to reflect on learning

Some good examples were:

http://www.open.ac.uk/safari/index.php - The Open University’s site to teach information literacy skills.

http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/reference/services/tutorials/Tutorial--Final%20Version.swf - An interactive tutorial for improving online search skills.

http://bibliobouts.org/ - A competitive game to help motivate students to create a project-based bibliography with the best resources they can find.

 

Adolphus, M. (2009). Using the web to teach information literacy. Online, 33 (4), 20-5.

Bent, M., & Stockdale, E. (2009). Integrating information literacy as a habit of learning - assessing the impact of a thread of IL through the curriculum. Journal Of Information Literacy, 3(1), 43-57.