We have a Social Networking Group here in the Libraries, charged with helping plan and develop the use of various library-related social applications. A few weeks ago, the group conducted an internal survey of Libraries' faculty and staff, to ascertain the current climate and future direction of social apps in the Libraries.
I'm not going to blog about the survey results themselves, although that would make an interesting blog post for any of the other group members (hint hint). One of the survey comments, however, said something that's had me thinking for the past few days.
The comment essentially said that in the world of information literacy, the expectation "is that we jump on every kind of information bandwagon that comes along." It went on to say that "the Web 2.0 hype is getting old already." Fair enough.
What made this useful comment stand out to me was simply that it qualified Web 2.0 tools as "being in the world of information literacy." My essential question was, "Why?" Is it because we have several information literacy librarians here in the library who are very enthusiastic about these tools, so much so that people here have begun to think, information literacy=Web 2.0? If that's true, we need to continue to stress how 2.0 tools can impact and be usefully embedded into all aspects of librarianship.
Really, though, this comment made me think about the essence of information literacy, and especially the IL standards. The IL standards are not tool-based, or even resource-based, they are skill based. Think about the definition of information literacy itself:
Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information."It is the learning outcomes that get more into resources and tools---and even then the Standards' learning outcomes are not so specific as to identify certain technologies--that would date them much too quickly.
What 2.0 technologies can do with regard to IL is give the students the tools they need, where they need them, so that they can more readily acquire information literacy skills. 2.0 technologies are simply more tools(like the computer, the OPAC, the reference desk).
And if we let them drop off our radar because it's too much to follow, or because we don't feel they fall under our purview, then our users will just move on to other tools that exist more readily in their world.
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