UNESCO and Information Literacy – a Review

1. Understanding Information Literacy: A Primer

By Forest Woody Horton, Jr., UNESCO, 2008; Download

An easy-to-read, non-technical overview explaining what “information literacy” means, designed for busy public policy-makers, business executives, civil society administrators and practicing professionals.

The family of 21st century “survival literacies” includes six categories:

  1. the basic or core functional literacy fluencies (competencies) of reading, writing, oralcy and numeracy;
  2. computer literacy;
  3. media literacy;
  4. distance education and e-learning;
  5. cultural literacy; and
  6. information literacy.

The boundaries between the various members of this family overlap, but they should be seen as a closely-knit family.

The Alexandria Proclamation adopted by the High Level Colloquium on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning in November 2005 defines information literacy as a means to “empower people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use and create information effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals”.

Paul Zurkowski is almost universally credited with being the first person to use the term “information literacy” in 1974. Information literacy offers the promise that people are now able to become independent learners, and critical thinkers.

Your competency in applying and utilizing those skills (= search for, retrieve, organize, evaluate and effectively use information) will enable you to make sounder and timelier decisions to cope with your personal and family health and welfare, educational, job-related, citizenship and other challenges.

The paper

  • provides 11 steps/processes of an information literacy life-cycle (Annex B),
  • 9 major recommendations for model strategies, action plans and monitoring mechanisms for information literacy and lifelong learning;
  • promotes the Information Literacy Counselor: the central focus of the job would be to provide information literacy and lifelong learning advice and assistance.

2. Overview of Information Literacy Resources Worldwide

By Forest Woody Horton, Jr., UNESCO, Paris, 2013, ISBN: 978-92-3-001131-4; Download

From the foreword:

“Citizens, communities and nations require a new set of attitudes, skills and knowledge to create, access, organize, evaluate, use, and communicate data, information and knowledge so as to achieve their personal, social, professional and educational goals.”

From the preface:

“A crucial means of selfempowerment is learning from where to seek, from whom to ask, and then to quickly and easily search for, find, retrieve, digest and use the right information at the right time to solve a problem at hand.

This process, which involves critical thinking and information evaluation, is coming to be called Information Literacy. Ideally it should be practiced over a lifetime, which is why it is often coupled with the concept of Lifelong Learning. […]

This project [The Worldwide Multilingual Information Literacy Resources Project] tries to link language, information literacy and lifelong learning together as a triad of inter-dependent, complementary, and strategic 21st century concepts.”

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