Edit: Iris blogged her own thoughts on this in her post What is Information Literacy Anyway?

Iris says on FriendFeed “I have to give a 10-minute presentation on information literacy today. I wish I knew what information literacy is.”

I know Iris is up to the challenge of explaining what information literacy is and then saying something useful about it in ten minutes. But it is true that “information literacy” can be slippery, and not everyone has the patience to get through ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. ACRL’s one-sentence definition is as follows: “Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.’”

If I were going to give a talk where defining information literacy or showing the difficulty of defining information literacy was part of the brief, I might start with the difficulty of defining “regular” literacy. I believe once upon a time, to be legally literate, a person had to be able to sign his or her own name. Now, even incoming college students who are fully “literate” by contemporary definitions still need to boost their literacy to be able to read complex academic writing and to write in a way that the academy values.

In a similar way, in the recent past a person might have been reasonably information “literate” if she or he could find a book in a card catalog. Now our incoming college students can find all kinds of information on the web, but need to come to a more nuanced understanding of what’s available and what is considered relevant in academe to be literate enough for college work.

Or perhaps instead, if I were in Iris’s shoes I’d start with “information.” It’s a word that has bothered me ever since I started library school. Look back at that ACRL definition. It’s easy enough (perhaps) to know when I have an “information need” when I don’t know how to get somewhere and need driving directions. But when I’m looking for articles to support my paper where I’m arguing that the tension between Wallace Shawn’s work as an actor and his work as a writer leads to a public persona that is self-deconstructing–well, what kind of “information” do I need there? We often talk about finding sources so the student can “join the conversation,” and I sometimes say they need to find multiple viewpoints they can get in their papers “and make ‘em fight.” In that case it seems less like finding “information” than it seems like finding “dinner party guests” or “sparring partners.”

If a person’s idea of finding information is determining how to get from here to there, or the chief exports of Bolivia, no wonder so many of them are in search of what Wayne Bivens-Tatum calls the improbable source. As with so many areas where students need to adjust to college, I think the role of information literacy in higher education is to take what students already know and complicate it, extend it, deepen it, and test it.