Teaching Information Literacy or Just Pieces of it?

I was happy today when I saw a ProfHacker post in the Chronicle of Higher Education using the phrase "information literacy" and was not written by a librarian. A couple years ago, I read letters to the editor in the Daily Egyptian from SIU faculty that superficially were about climate change. They seemed to me to really be about information literacy. Not one of them ever used that phrase. Maybe it's finally catching on -- just in time for librarians to switch to the phrase "information fluency."

Granted, an assistant professor of English is not that far afield from a librarian, but it's a step in the right direction. The comments on the post so far have come from librarians and composition instructors, and they seem to understand that information literacy is more than how to use the library or how to find information.

The Google resource that the article is about, on the other hand, is not so clear that the people at Google understand what else is involved in information literacy. Admittedly, most of my one-shot sessions in classes focus on those two things too. In the long run, though, those two things aren't the most important parts of information literacy for students to take with them after they leave college.

Knowing how to order a book from the McLafferty Annex or how to use Boolean operators will help them in the short term. After graduation, students won't need to think about the McLafferty Annex again. Online searching is moving toward something more like weighted text matching of search terms and less like the set operations that most library databases use today, so I don't know how valuable Boolean operators will be in the long term.

In the long term, it's more helpful for them to be able to recognize limitations in their knowledge and that research is needed. It's more helpful for them to be able to discern differences among sources. It's more helpful to use that discernment to decide how much trust to place in their sources.

Now the challenge for me is to keep the long term in mind when I'm doing one-shot instruction. I want to make sure that the students can handle the basic (but convoluted) mechanics of getting information sources from the library. Too often, I lose the long term in that.