Information Literacy

I had a college technology committee meeting today and the talk at the end of the meeting turned to information literacy. It became clear that information literacy has become discipline specific and that there were wide variations in opinion on the subject even among departments housed in the same college. For example, one departmental rep wanted to know what the consensus was on Wikipedia since his department felt that it should never be consulted while another department felt that it was a good starting point for students starting their research. As we talked about this, we came to the realization that there really was no body or group at IUP designed to address the issue of information literacy and that it has now been delegated or relegated to departments. This would not be a problem, but while I feel that my departmental colleagues are very good at traditional information literacy, there are many that are unfamiliar with the newer, digital aspects of information literacy. What does this discussion lead to? That I do not know, but it really has me thinking that (in an ideal world) all of our history majors would have to take an information literacy course taught by a historian in the department. Since we are short on faculty, however, I do not see this happening any time soon.

RSM