Winning With Information Literacy

I was just scanning an article called Winning With Information Literacy by Jamie McKenzie that Michael Lorenzen posted yesterday. While it focuses more on the use of technology in learning in the K-12 world, it does sort of fit in with the issue of computer literacy v. information literacy that Jennifer raised a couple of weeks ago.

Excerpt: "Literacy may be the unifying theme most capable of enlisting broad-based support for the use of new technologies in schools. Literacy refers to the cluster of skills that are required to make meaning of one’s world across a mix of media — everything from text, graphics and art to numbers, body language and cultural cues.

The reason literacy can prove unifying is its dramatic relevance to many of the most challenging portions of the new state curriculum standards. Students possessing powerful information literacy skills are more likely to perform well on tasks requiring inference and interpretation, on items where the answer must be built rather than found." (emphasis mine)

It seems like this definition of literacy can encompass both computer literacy and information literacy. The computer or web becomes another tool to provide information that must be interpreted to be used properly.