Oh yes, people. October is Information Literacy Month according to the White House. How awesome that this coincides with the IL teaching load at work.
There might be some grumbling about this out in the Blog- or Twittersphere. But when you take a moment to think about it, what does this proclamation really mean? It recognizes that information is not power alone. It recognizes that information is necessary but not necessarily. It recognizes that information alone is not enough. That critical thinking about information is central to an information society.
And that librarians have an important role to play. Our role may be changing, as is the role of information. My awesome co-worker, Andy Burkhardt, is blogging that these days. But we have a role to play.
The real question is what role that is going to be?
What are you going to do?
Come on. Tell me.
5 comments:
I've been wondering over at my own blog (shameless self-promotion alert: http://librarianscommute.blogspot.com/2009/10/creating-maintaining-and-sharing.html ) about exactly HOW librarians & information literasts (yes I just made up that title) can encourage the sharing of materials and resources that are ever-easier to find and use...
Thanks for the comment, Olivia, and for the creative words! Love your thinking and questions. I put my response on your blog.
I've been thinking about our role a lot lately. Although the main trend for info. lit. these days seems to be course integrated, I wonder if that is really doing the job? If info. lit. is, as the President indicated, a critical life skill, shouldn't we be teaching actual credit courses in the subject?
Michelle, This is a great question but a tough one in part because I'm not sure credit bearing courses are truly better, especially since most of them continue to be about using the library rather than thinking about information critically over all. But I'll think about it and blog it. It's a good, hard question. I love those.
Yes, it is a hard question! I totally agree that if we teach credit courses they should not be about "Library Skills". But, what about things like information organization and management? I'm not sure either. I wonder if students are not getting these skills, who will begin to teach them? Sometimes I think too much though! ;) I'll be interested to hear your thoughts.
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