Information literacy is an evolving discipline predicated by the sea change in the information landscape brought about by the internet and the digital economy, and has become a critical skill in every field.
In fact, information literacy has been identified as a Top 5 skill among employers in all fields (Head, 2012), who express frustration with the inability of new college hires to “think beyond Google.” In the modern digital landscape, it is also an essential lifelong skill, as our graduates navigate information in their personal lives regarding health, legal issues, community and politics, privacy, and a polarized and customized ubiquitous media environment.
“Digital natives” are uniquely and perhaps counterintuitively underprepared for the current complex information environment. A higher comfort level with technology is often conflated with being “information savvy,” (Vaidhyanathan, 2008) when in reality today’s students demonstrate a lack of understanding of even fundamental information concepts (for instance, how a search engine ranks results, or how results are tailored to them based on their previous online activity – the “filter bubble”).
