Information literacy initial thoughts

It is incredibly important to have an information literacy policy in a 21st Century school.

I work in an all-boys secondary school where there is no information literacy policy, nor is there any meaningful information literacy instruction that I have ever heard of in my 9 years at the school. What concerns me the most is that there is NO instruction on website evaluation or appropriate use of the Internet for research assignments. Like we, budding TLs-in-training, have heard before the students believe that sites such as Wikipedia are reliable sources of information and the second point of call for information behind Google. Like most students the boys at my school are so overwhelmed with the information that’s out there. They desperately need the skills to understand how to sift through the mountain of information to find what is the most relevant and up-to-date that serves the information needs for their assignments. The students need to become critical users of information. Importantly, I think the students must be skilled in ways to avoid plagiarism. If they don’t learn it at school, where are they going to learn those skills. Certainly by the time they get to senior high school and university it is WAY TOO LATE.