Making the Case for Information Literacy

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Opinion

Making the Case for Information Literacy

7/25/2006

By Lorie Roth, California State University, Office of the Chancellor

For two decades, U.S. newspapers and magazines have featured articles about new technologies; the information explosion, information overload, and information illiterates. They frequently report on students’ (and some professors’) egregious lapses of integrity and judgment in dealing with information. By comparison, the higher education establishment has been relatively feeble in its attempt to raise awareness of and adapt to the shifting demands of the information age. Due to the advance of the dot-coms, dot-orgs, dot-govs, and dot-edus, what students learn and how they learn will have to be reconceived.

Lorie Roth is Assistant Vice Chancellor for
Academic Programs at California State University.

Despite the wholesale transformation in the way we interact with information, most professors today still think that their job in an academic course is to “cover the material.” This notion of pedagogy, which could be called the “content” or the “coverage” model, has been stretched to the breaking point by the information explosion. To accommodate the almost daily advances of knowledge in their fields, faculty members are forced to proceed relentlessly through ever-expanding textbooks and to resort to lecturing, a supposedly “efficient” method of covering the material, whether the students seated in the classroom number fifteen or five hundred. Yet, as many researchers have shown, other types of pedagogies might be more useful in helping students actively learn rather than passively receive. A content emphasis – that is, knowing information, rather than a skills emphasis – using information – still prevails in most university classrooms.

For students, learning a static subject matter can be considered only a short-term investment. Within a few years of graduation, the explosion of information is likely to change the content of a discipline and students will find that the relevance of the banked knowledge from their college days has eroded over time. The storehouse of knowledge accumulated in a college education will need to be replenished through lifelong learning experiences, both formal and informal. As a result, students earning a college degree today must prepare for a life and a career in which they will continually need to learn new knowledge and skills. The educated person in the 21 st century will be someone who knows how to learn – someone who has the motivation, the intellectual curiosity, and the disposition to ask questions and productively look for answers. This is why information literacy should be a vital component of every student’s college education and why the higher education community should mobilize more aggressively to respond to the new information environment.