American Competitiveness in the Internet Age

I don't think I picked up on a short report that emerged from the Information Literacy Summit held in the USA in October 2006. It has brief accounts of three panels on three themes: The Global challenge; The student and worker challenge; The public policy challenge. One of the interesting points I picked out was the contribution of Jan Magill (Director, Workforce and Education Programs Institute for a Competitive Workforce, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). "Magill described the Chamber of Commerce’s efforts to create a work readiness credential. It was developed to help evaluate entry-level workers’ ability to think critically and to use information effectively in decision-making." Unfortunately, when you go to the website of the initiative (launched in January) at http://www.workreadiness.com/, information use is not one of the nine skills which are highlighted. The National Work Readiness Credential is based on the Equipped for the Future (EFF) "applied learning standards" e.g. the 9 skills are a subset of 16 described by EFF. Information literacy isn't in these 16 skills either, but it does include Gather, Analyze, and Use Information as one of the 13 common activities for people in any of the three roles identified in the EFF material (which are citizen/community member, worker, and parent/family member). This all looks worth more investigation.

Another nice quote from the report in the Public Policy challenge section is from Patrick Callan (President, The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education) who "suggested that perhaps information literacy does not have a high profile because nobody is against it; it is, in fact, rather universally approved. However, its general acceptance means that there is no debate, no discussion, no conversation about information literacy—as there is with other more controversial curriculum issues. Callan remarked, 'Information literacy isn’t sexy; it’s just essential.' "

Perrault, A.M. and Roth, L. (2006) American Competitiveness in the Internet Age. National Forum on Information Literacy. http://www.infolitsummit.com/Documents/InfoLitSummit16Oct2007B.pdf

Photo by Sheila Webber: Cherry blossom, Greenwich park, April 2007.