estell_e itsme's Public Library

Specific aspects of information literacy (Shapiro and Hughes, 1996)

• Tool literacy, or the ability to understand and use the practical and conceptual tools of current information technology relevant to education and the areas of work and professional life that the individual expects to inhabit.
• Resource literacy, or the ability to understand the form, format, location and access methods of information resources, especially daily expanding networked information resources.
• Social-structural literacy, or understanding how information is socially situated and produced.
• Research literacy, or the ability to understand and use the IT-based tools relevant to the work of today's researcher and scholar.
• Publishing literacy, or the ability to format and publish research and ideas electronically, in textual and multimedia forms (including via World Wide Web, electronic mail and distribution lists, and CD-ROMs).
• Emerging technology literacy, or the ability to continuously adapt to, understand, evaluate and make use of the continually emerging innovations in information technology so as not to be a prisoner of prior tools and resources, and to make intelligent decisions about the adoption of new ones.
• Critical literacy, or the ability to evaluate critically the intellectual, human and social strengths and weaknesses, potentials and limits, benefits and costs of information technologies. Ira Shor defines critical literacy as

habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.[3]