Information Literacy and Its Role in Education

Előadó: Zakota Zoltán

Zoltan Zakota is lecturer at the Partium Christian University, in Oradea, Romania. At present, he is lecturing computer science and application of informatics in economics and society. His main fields of interest are information and knowledge-based society, the effects of ICT on society, economics and education. Actually, he is involved in two main projects dealing with the European higher education and the effects of the Romanian-Hungarian trans-frontier cooperation on regional development.

Előadás absztrakt:

The first attempts in using Interactive Learning Environments are dated back in the 1960s as alternatives to the established forms of education. They were developed mainly to extend the access to learning both geographically and socially, and to dismantle the existing official barriers. Based on a half-a-century long experience, e-learning appeared at the beginning of the new millennium as a response to the heavy questions and demands raised by the numerous social and economic needs of the Information Society. Of course, its sources are routed not only in these needs and demands, but also in the unparalleled technological advancements of the Informational and Communication Technologies. These had a huge contribution in transforming both self-driven and teacher-driven learning by supplying various highly proficient teaching and learning tools. The relationship between e-learning and traditional education is a very complex one. Depending on the concrete pedagogical situation, e-Learning can be an alternative as well as a supplement or a complement to the actual traditional learning. On the other hand, it can act on both institutional and systemic levels. Due to the very quick and widespread changes our globalizing society is actually undergoing, learning became a long-range activity extending over every field of our life. Now we can speak not only about a longitudinal dimension of learning (Life Long Learning), but also about a transversal one (Life Wide Learning). Different forms of learning (formal, non-formal and informal) are not specifically bound to one of these dimensions; they can appear in both. In order to be successful in various areas of contemporary life, one has to possess an advanced level of Information Literacy. This means the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand. It covers the whole range of information related activities, from defining our information needs to the successful gathering of them and from the evaluation of our sources to their inclusion in our own knowledge system. And behind all these, Information Literacy means also knowledge about the sociocultural, economic and legal frameworks, as well as the ethical implications of information usage. Today’s students need, even more than they parents, to master Information Literacy. They have to fulfill the before mentioned conditions, to develop the necessary critical skills and high dexterity in order to manipulate in an efficient way all the apparatus needed to gather, produce, process, store, select and destroy information. The Electronic, or Digital, Learning Environment is highly important in assuring the necessary educational means to the new generations, by combining different hypertext-based and multi-media elements.