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GAIL BUSH: Information literacy is a concept that
came around at the end of the 20th century century
when information was becoming prolific.
And it's about being very critical thinking around
information; about being able to access information,
how to evaluate it had to judge it;
how to synthesize it and then how to use it
for your purposes.
It's really gone through a transformation in the last ten,
twenty years into twenty-first century
learning skills so information literacy is
now part of that but it's not the entire part.
You need to know those learning skills,
you need to have the disposition to use them,
You have to be -- understand how to be responsible and
to be self-evaluative; to have self assessment strategies.
And in the 20th century we taught that we needed to
answer the question and in the 21st century we teach
that we need to question the answer.
Now the students coming up are very facile in finding
information but not very much so in evaluating it.
And the teachers that we have predominately came up
in that sort of old style of learning.
Around uh...cognitive authority, meaning that
we could trust the -- there was authority to the
information sources that we used.
And now we need to -- we know that we cannot trust
every information source that we see and we need to
know how to think critically around them.
How to maintain that critical stance.
How to employ it.
And then how to stay open to new ideas and
information and to be open to change your mind if you
find evidence that is valid,
that makes you change your perspective.
You have to really transcend the format of the literacy.
It used to be, “Oh, you can use books,
you can't use the internet.
You can use encyclopedias, you can’t use magazines."
But now you have to really transcend those formats
because they have become, literally, uh...irrelevant.
You have to, though, still be able to verify the source.
You have to consider the source of the information
and whose perspective is being relayed in that information.
Where is the bias?
A very simple way also for teachers is to have their
students create a “objective” source.
Have them create a documentary.
And they, through that demonstration,
through that performance, they learn how subjective
many objective sources are.
In the past we always felt that you needed to know
whatever the information was and to be
confident and to not change your opinion and to
seek some, almost uh...eternal nugget of information
and that just might not be the case anymore.
You might end up with two or three pieces of
information that seem equally valid from their
own perspectives and you have to be able to teach
students what's important to know.
Which might be the best or why do you think this
perspective is coming out of this source or what
should we go with for this purpose for what our focus
is in our learning.