Without information skills, students will not become information literate, but information skills do not happen without a conscious effort on the part of teachers. It is extraordinarily hard to distinguish them from comprehension skills, listening skills, visual literacy skills, thinking skills and problem solving skills, not to mention the aforesaid computer skills. What makes these skills into information skills is when they are used in the process of finding, using, interpreting and producing information, and turning it into knowledge . Most teachers we know make a pretty good fist of teaching things like alphabetic skills, listening skills, computer skills, visual literacy skills, looking things up skills , problem solving skills, brainstorming, questioning, comprehension and notemaking skills. It simply isn t the sort of thing that can be reduced to a checklist like library plan , parts of the book , how the catalogue or CD or Internet works and ticked as being done for the year.
Information literacy is to learning as yeast is to bread.
Initially my concern with NEMP tasks was that they could not, by definition, monitor the process of finding, using, interpreting and producing information after it has been filtered through the head, simply because this is a time consuming process with a coherence that will inevitably be compromised if it is chunked into a range of discrete tasks, however intrinsically interesting and relevant. No, not at all. I welcome it because I think it will highlight, for teachers, the awareness that these skills are not acquired by osmosis, that they need to be taught, year after year, if students are to develop towards information literacy. Collectively they drive learning, and, as such, they need to be monitored.