Pages

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Towards an information literate society; IL as a catalyst for educational change #GlobalMILweek

As Global Media and Information Literacy week draws towards a close, I thought I would recall one of the publications that I think is particularly important: The Prague declaration "towards an information literate society" which was a product of the first strategic international and cross-sectoral meeting on Information Literacy, in 2003. The document is only one page, but has one of my favourite definitions of information literacy:
"Information Literacy encompasses knowledge of one’s information concerns and needs, and the ability to identify, locate, evaluate, organize and effectively create, use and communicate information to address issues or problems at hand; it is a prerequisite for participating effectively in the Information Society, and is part of the basic human right of life long learning." http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/CI/pdf/PragueDeclaration.pdf The meeting report is also interesting.

I was hoping to link to the proceedings of one of the influential International Lifelong learning conferences (held between 2000 and 2008), which had a rich mix of papers about information literacy and lifelong/adult learning, strong on critical and social justice perspectives. Unfortunately the institutional repository they used to be in seems to be no more (though fortunately for me, I have the printed copies). However, I identified a 2004 keynote from Christine Bruce in a different repository. This discusses themes which are still with us.:
Bruce, C. (2004) Information Literacy as a Catalyst for Educational Change. A Background Paper . In Danaher, P. et al. (Eds.) Proceedings “Lifelong Learning: Whose responsibility and what is your contribution?”, the 3rd International Lifelong Learning Conference. (pp. 8-19). Central Queensland University. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4977/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Beech in autumn, October 2019

No comments:

Post a Comment