How many questions did you ask today?
From the moment you get up from your bed, you may have asks simple questions like, "What time is it?" or questions that require deep reasoning such as, "Why should most companies and organizations start their work at 8:00AM?"
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| Old man reading newspapers |
Everyday, people are always seeking for information. Individuals are in a constant search for answers. Companies, organizations and people rely on good information to reach a conclusion, make favorable choice, and communicate effectively.
Good information is accurate, reliable and up-to-date. It is essential for research papers, reports, projects, assignments and decision making. But, how can you find good information in an increasingly vast oceans of information through the Web, mass media, and published works?
Information Literacy
To effectively find and use information, a set of skills is needed. What are those skills? Information literacy.
Information Literacy describes a set of abilities that enables an individual to acquire, evaluate, and use information. It is a lifelong learning process as you can still be developing it as you grow.
Information literacy has five components: identify, find, evaluate, apply, and acknowledge sources of information. Each skill is individually important in understanding on how they are related to one another. It is essential to becoming an information literate person.
5 Components of Information Literacy
Identify
The ability of a person to identify the type of question and its requirement, select the appropriate answer to the question given, and relate to the question.
Find
This skill refers to identifying the appropriate tools to search the needed information and identify sources to use, design and implement search strategies to find information, assess and select the appropriate information needed from the search results found, manage and record relevant information from the search results and refines search strategies, if necessary, by repeating "identify" and/or "find" processes.
Evaluate
The intuition to recognize and summarize main ideas from the information found from search results. Evaluating also includes identifying and creating evaluation criteria and assessing the information from the search results found with the evaluation criteria and comparing it to existing knowledge. Also, part of the process is searching strategies and/or evaluation criteria, if necessary, by repeating "identify", "find" and "evaluate" processes.
Apply
An information literate individual applies, integrate and synthesize new and existing information ethically and legally into paper, project, performance, etc. He also acknowledge new information used in paper, project, performance, etc. without plagiarizing and by appropriately attributing and citing sources. He can share paper, project, performance, etc. with others using appropriate communication medium, format, technology, etc.
Acknowledge
It refers to the transfer of knowledge gained from this process to future questions, assignments, etc. and by appropriately attributing and citing sources.
Information Literate Individual
The information literacy skills set determines what an information literate individual can do, which can be summarized as below:
- Determine the extent of information needed
- Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
- Evaluate information and its sources critically
- Incorporate selected information into one's knowledge base
- Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.
- Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally.
A person who has the set of skills needed to find and use information is an information literate individual.
How information literate, are you?
Can you now find the answer to the question you were searching?
What format would it be?
How are you going to find the information from an endless number of sources?
These questions must be considered because a typical internet search can display results that are a combination of current and outdated, authoritative and biased, and reliable and misleading sources. Moreover, an online search can give you an overwhelming amount of information that is difficult to process. These are the challenges that an information literate individual like you is made to overcome.
Information literacy skills is essential to your success. In Senior High School, you use these skills to perform well on research papers, projects, and presentations. At work, you will likely encounter situations where you must seek out new information to help you reach a practical, efficient, and beneficial decision. At home, you may have faced consumer issues. At social events, you will probably be discussing opinions on social and political topics. Each situation requires the application of information literacy processes.
For Grade 12 Senior High School taking the Media and Information Literacy class, continue learning using your online interactive module for Media and Information Literacy Quarter 2 - Module 3 here.
Sources:
Canva for Education
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