This document discusses how information literacy skills are important for students in the 21st century. It argues that students need to be able to effectively access and evaluate both traditional information sources as well as emerging online tools and formats. The document provides guidance on how to teach students skills for searching, evaluating, and creating information across different tools and platforms. It emphasizes that both traditional information literacy skills and an understanding of new online tools are important for students to develop.

1. Web 2.0 Meets Information Literacy: Make new friends and keep the old
Joyce Kasman Valenza
When they leave our schools, today’s learners will not be called upon to create
widgets. They will be called upon to work together to thoughtfully use and create
knowledge products.
To be most effective, workers of the future will need to creatively blend several
relatively traditional skills with emerging information and communication tools.
And they will need to practice those skills in an information landscape that is
genre-shifting, media-rich, participatory, socially connected, and brilliantly
chaotic. To be most effective, students will need understandings of traditional
information structures as well as understandings of the shifts in the way
knowledge is built and organized
Two threads
Through my librarian visioning glasses, I see two threads—information fluency
and Web 2.0-- beautifully woven into rich 21st century cloth as teachers and
librarians who value thinking skills, inquiry, ethical behavior, and innovative
student work hone their craft on a funky and vibrant 21st century learning loom,
with learners as collaborators.
About that new thread—Web 2.0--it is colorful and dynamic. Its fabric reveals
new opportunities for collaborations, creation of media, and interactions with
audiences never before imagined. Our learners already use this thread, the
emerging collaborative communication tools of the 21st century. The November
2005 Pew Internet & American Life Study
(http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Content_Creation.pdf) revealed
that 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered content creators.
These 12 to 17-year olds have created a blog or webpage, posted original
artwork, stories or videos online, or remixed online content into new artistic
creations (Lenhart and Madden, 2005).
About that other thread. . . The traditional strand—information literacy-- is a
sturdy material. It is fiber that many of us digital immigrants carried over in our
trunks from the old country. It too deserves to be unpacked and shared--woven
through instruction and learning.
Information literacy or fluency is the ability to effectively and ethically use and
create information. Although it has been described in various ways through
various models, it is generally considered a process in which students (and the
rest of us) recognize a need for information; formulate questions based on those
needs; identify potential information sources; develop strategies for physically
and intellectually accessing information; evaluate, analyze, synthesize and

2. organize new information with existing knowledge; and effectively, ethically and
creatively communicate new knowledge.
When we discuss information literacy, we are discussing the application of
information problem-solving and decision-making skills in situations learners face
in all their subject areas and in their lives beyond our classrooms.
Information literacy competencies are process skills. They will grow with
students, even when current search tools and platforms are obsolete, when we
move beyond Web 2.0. These skills have legs. They will serve learners even
when they forget how to balance a chemical equation or how to solve for X.
They prepare students to learn to learn.
Information fluencies are embraced by the American Association of School
Librarians and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology
in their Information Literacy Standards for Student Learners
(http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslproftools/informationpower/InformationLiteracySt
andards_final.pdf). They are woven through the International Society for
Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards
(http://www.iste.org/Template.cfm?Section=NETS) , as well as the ICT Literacy
Maps of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning
(http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/). They are also woven through the standards
documents of most disciplines.
So, how do we interpret traditional skills for a chaotic, exciting, multimodal,
socially mediated information 2.0 landscape? And how does our instruction shift
as the information landscape evolves?
Information access
Information access involves recognizing the need for information, identifying
potential sources, and strategies for locating information.
In recent keynotes I have heard celebrated information specialists and futurists
proclaim that we live in a good enough / why bother world. If people can easily
find some information, they will not be motivated to find better or best
information. As a teacher and as a librarian I find this approach impossible to
accept. My math teacher colleagues do not stop their efforts at multiplication and
division. They move as many of their learners toward higher applications and
deeper mathematical thinking. Why should we not expect learners to master
more thoughtful information seeking strategies?
We can encourage students to seek information energetically. That may include
reaching beyond everyone’s favorite search engine or wiki reference tool.
Though Google rocks it is not the only band in town. Google’s information reach
is staggering, yet it may not be the best strategy for all information tasks.
Innovation is thriving in the search world. In fact, a number of alternate search

3. tools employ a less “vertical”, far more user-centered approach. We can
introduce the flexible A9.com http://a9.com with its 2.0 like user-centered result
lists and its transparent search across media formats--books, blogs, Web, video.
Rollyo http://www.rollyo.com/ and Filangy http://www.filangy.com/ , offer a more
personalized approach to searching. We can point to tools like Clusty
http://clusty.com, where on-the-fly, expandable subheadings and related
concepts compensate for students’ limited vocabulary and content area
knowledge. KartOO http://kartoo.com/ and Music Plasma
http://www.musicplasma.com/ represent a growing number of tools responding to
the preferences of visual learners. In a highly effective, if more 1.0 approach, we
can remind students of traditional subject directories like Librarians’ Index to the
Internet (http://lii.org) or KidsClick! (http://www.kidsclick.org/) or the many
subject-specific portals that offer the significant advantages of selection and far
less search noise. Debbie Abilock’s Choose the Best Search for Your
Information Need
http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.ht
ml and Laura Cohen’s (U. Albany) How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory
(http://www.internettutorials.net/choose.html) keep up with the choices and serve
as a guide for students.
The fact is that many of us can learn to use Google’s coolest features better to
make the types of materials we want and need most to rise to the first couple of
pages of our result lists. Teachers and librarians can point to the power of
Google’s advanced search tools. (For instance, you are likely to find reports and
lengthy documents by first searching for PDF as a file format.) We can link
students to sections of Google’s excellent directory, for example its Issues page
http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/
Because students will need to access both traditional and emerging sources,
through both formal and informal information systems, they need understandings
of both worlds. In subscription databases, it helps to know the underlying
structure of controlled vocabulary and subject hierarchy. Students can use the
official descriptors or subject headings to help them gather relevant content.
They can select to search by either keyword or by subject and that choice really
matters. Field searching offers users great precision if they know what they are
looking for. While Google and other search engines assume an AND between
words and phrases, databases continue to make use of Boolean operators.
Simply using the word AND in a database, can mean the difference between a
failed and a successful search. In nearly all search environments, using
quotation marks to identify a phrase is an effective, time-saving strategy.
It pays to take time to do some old-fashioned brainstorming before attacking a
search box. Developing a query involves deciding on the important words,
predicting the words and phrases most likely to appear in your “dream”
documents. Searching is an interactive, recursive process. We can teach

4. students to mine their result lists to find additional words and phrases will allow
them to use vocabulary they might not have originally considered.
Students have greater search power when they understand the newly tagged
world. Tags are emerging as powerful tools, different from the structured
controlled vocabulary and subject headings of databases. Technorati
(http://technorati.com) now identifies more than 100 million author-generated
tags (Sifry, 2006). As they search, students should be on the look out for the
various types of tags assigned to the best information they find. Those public-
created tags will assist them in gathering related content. They can discover
information relationships by exploring aggregators like technorati
http://technorati.com or del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/ . Student-developed tag
clouds allow for browsing among related concepts, broader and narrower terms,
names, places, etc. offering a freedom beyond outlining or taxonomy. A teachers
who asks a learner to “show me your tag cloud” will see the various directions a
student’s research, and her thinking, is taking.
We can teach students to control their own information worlds. By selecting
relevant RSS feeds, they restructure search dynamics, channeling information to
automatically flow in their direction, personalizing their own stream of information.
As students find relevant information and news sources, we need to guide them
to seek RSS buttons and capture those feeds.
According to the Pew study The Internet Goes to College: How Students are
Living in the Future with Today’s Technology, (Jones and Madden, 2002)
freshman college students favor commercial searches engines over academic
databases their universities support: “Although academic resources are offered
online, it may be that students have not been taught, or have not yet figured out,
how to locate these resources” (p. 13).
Those who wait for information to be set free, those who wait for all the scholars
and authors to put their work up outside of their books and journals, may be
waiting a very long time. As Google strives to digitize the print content of
university libraries, our K12 students may not recognize that they have
substantial libraries of content already available to them that Google hasn’t yet
and may never grab. They do not have to wait.
Hundreds of databases offer hundreds of thousands of valuable documents
beyond those accessible on the free Web. Schools, state and national libraries
and government agencies subscribe to content that is both developmentally and
content-appropriate for learners. Unless we teach students about the enormous
value of these reference sources, ebooks, magazine, journal, and newspaper
articles, unless we value them ourselves, students will not find them or use them.
I could not conduct my own research without the university equivalents of
databases created by such vendors as: EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, Wilson, to

5. name just a few. Because our school culture values these sources, because
they are designed directly to meet their information needs, our students have
grown to love them as well. We point to them in our pathfinders. We create
access to them both by name (http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/catalogs.html) and by
subject (http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/databasessubject.html and we look forward to
finding an effective federated search solution that will search across the
databases, our catalog, and the Web.
Teachers and librarians must ensure that these valuable materials get used and
are no further than a click or two away from learners. Students who do not have
access to this substantial content, students who choose not to use them, are part
of what I consider an information underclass. It is distressing that students and
teachers settle for information that is good enough, when excellent is out there
and just one further click away. Students need to be able to access the scholarly
content their professors will expect them to grapple with, the business journals
and reports their employers will want them to cite in board meetings.
If scholarly or professional content makes sense for your students and your
budget does not allow an investment, free choices are increasing and we must
link students to them. In addition to Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com
and Windows Live Academic http://academic.live.com searches, our pathfinders
might guide students to sources with limited full text journal content: the
Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/, FindArticles
http://www.findarticles.com/
FreeFullText.com http://freefulltext.com/I.htm
MagPortal.com http://magportal.com/. Google recently Google announced its
News Archive Search http://news.google.com/archivesearch of both free and
pay-per-use content and Time Magazine recently posted its free archive
(http://www.time.com/time/archive/) which reaches back to 1923.
Interactive survey sites allow students to design and conduct original research.
Using tools like SurveyMonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) and
SurveyScholar http://www.surveyscholar.com/, ZohoPolls http://polls.zoho.com/,
and Zoomerang http://info.zoomerang.com/, students can easily collect data and
graphically describe their results. Surveys are truly authentic experiences
requiring students to navigate through some of the sticky issues of inquiry--
predicting question issues, deciding how large a sample should be, designing
effective question formats---single choice, multiple choice, rating scales, drop-
down menus. The sophisticated reports these sites generate eliminate some of
the challenging statistical work previously associated with playing with survey
data, forcing learners to focus on understanding and interpretation
The internet fosters a search environment in which learners work independently,
often in their rooms, often after midnight. There are fewer face-to-face
opportunities for adults to intervene to help assess an information problem, focus
a topic, suggest keywords and alternate vocabulary, or recommend a critical

6. book or website or portal. While we should celebrate the independence of
learners, we must recognize that any 15-year-old doesn’t really know what she
doesn’t know.
We can guide students through the search process by creating online
landscapes that help them make sense of their nearly limitless choices.
Collaboratively created Web-based pathfinders can create information blueprints
for particular units or projects. They pull together resources of multiple formats to
meet the specific needs of the learning community. Using these tools, we can
create schema to help students to think in terms of information clusters or
buckets—the types of buckets they will be able to apply to future information
tasks. As teachers and librarians in this new landscape, we have new
opportunities to intervene, AND to have dialog, while respecting young people’s
need for independence. Librarians are beginning to move their pathfinders to
blogs and wikis, to open them to students and teachers for collaboration and
comments. They can suggest search strategies. They can lead students to
information types-- primary sources, literary criticism, biography, news. They can
lead students to the variety of information formats—portals of streaming media,
wikibooks, ebooks, blogs, ejournals. The internet offers us opportunities for
examining global perspectives. As students research the issues of our day, we
need to help them to discover the media of other regions—the streaming media,
the newspapers.
Evaluation
This fluency involves determining accuracy, relevance, comprehensiveness;
distinguishing among facts, points of view and opinions; and selecting the most
useful resources for a particular information need.
The traditional publication process made evaluation a much simpler skill back in
the days before digitization, and in the days before information assumed new
democratic formats. And while it was easier to teach evaluation in a controlled,
black and white world, a world where resources fit into neat little boxes, we now
live in a wonderfully rich confusion.
New, as well as traditional questions emerge as learners evaluate the information
they find. What is authority? Whose voices are valid and when? Is it best to
examine the collective knowledge of the public, or the expert knowledge of
academics? What is the information context? Is it a casual information need or a
formal or critical project? Who is the audience for my project? Is it an instructor
who values scholarship and depth? Is it a breaking issue for which scholarly
material does not yet exist? Is the best source scholarly, popular, trade; “on the
ground” and timely, or retrospective and reflective; primary or secondary; biased
or balanced?
Just as mega-store sites like Amazon address the long tail or the niche market,
the Web, and blogging especially, promote the flourishing of the niche opinion, a

7. great democratic concept, but a challenge for learners struggling to evaluate
context and bias.
We’ve been offering advice for evaluating websites for more than ten years: use
a healthy amount of skepticism when examining any source regarding authority,
credibility, accuracy, relevance, and timeliness. We’ve suggested students
perform Google link checks to see who has linked to a site in question or consult
http://whois.org to identify the origin of a domain. Similar advice should be
applied to Web 2.0 sources. Kathy Schrock offers a rich collection of evaluation
tools for both 1.0 and 2.0 on her Guide for Educators
(http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/eval.html).
How should students evaluate and select blogs as information sources? With
blog space doubling every six months and technorati http://technorati.com
tracking more than 37 million blogs (Sifrey, 2006), how do we help learners to cut
through the noise? Blogs are essentially primary sources and can provide lively
insights and perspectives not documented by traditional sources. They compare
in some ways to a traditional interview, with the speaker controlling the
questions. Ripe for essays and debate, blogs present not only the traditional two
sides of an issue, but the potentially thousands of takes. And those takes take
less time to appear than those documents forced through the traditional
publishing or peer review process. Blogs allow scholars and experts written
opportunities to loosen their ties and engage in lively conversation.
Blogs require new types of examination. Some questions learners might ask as
they evaluate blogs:
• Who is the blogger? With so many blogs offering spotty or nonexistent
“about” pages, this may be a clue in itself.
• What sorts of materials is the blogger reading or citing?
• Does this blogger have influence? Is the blog well-established? Who and
how many people link to the blog? Who is commenting? Does this blog
appear to be part of a community? (The best blogs are likely to be hubs
for folks who share interests with the blogger.) Tools like Technorati http://
technorati.com and Blogpulse http://blogpulse.com can help learners
assess the influence of a blog.
• Is this content covered in any depth, with any authority?
• How sophisticated is the language, the spelling?
• Is this blog alive? It there a substantial archive? How current are the
posts?
• At what point in a story’s lifetime did a post appear? Examining a story’s
date may offer clues as to the reliability of a blog entry.
• Is the site upfront about its bias? Does it recognize/discuss other points of
view? (For certain information tasks--an essay or debate--bias may be
especially useful. Students need to recognize it.)

8. • If the blogger is not a traditional “expert,” is this a first-hand view that
would also be valuable for research? Is it a unique perspective?
For our 8th project on the Middle Ages, we illustrate the process of evaluation by
pulling up a slightly cleaned up Google result list. Together with the classroom
teacher, students discuss whether or not items on the list would make
appropriate choices for the particular research task. We look at portals, and
blogs, wikis, student-generated sites, and university sites. The teacher
discusses whether it makes sense to use Wikipedia or other encyclopedias as
sources. For many of our teachers these reference tools are good places to
start. They may work as strategies for building vocabulary, identifying experts,
and locating additional resources.
Over the past couple of years a big issue in learning to evaluate has been what
to do about Wikipedia. Its content is heavily accessed; its articles appear on
nearly every result list. Its democratic editing process provokes questions relating
to the wisdom of crowds and the value of experts. Wikipedia forces us to
examine the dynamic nature of information and to explore how knowledge is
built. Whom do we trust and when do we trust them?
If a project has to do with breaking news, a hot topic, technology, or popular
culture, Wikipedia may be the very best place to start. One of its advantages
over print is that it is not limited by traditional publishing restrictions of cost or
size. It is able to address the long information tail, providing something for nearly
any interest.
But when teachers encourage students to find scholarly materials, Wikipedia may
not be the best place to start. Academics, concerned about tenure and
promotion generally find other avenues for publication. High school and
university students need to know that teachers and professors will expect them to
reach beyond Wikipedia.
I want my students to succeed in any academic setting. I want them to find the
best possible sources for their specific needs. In some circumstances Wikipedia,
or any traditional encyclopedia may be embarrassing to cite. In an interview
quoted in David Weinberger’s Joho the Blog, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, speaking
as a panelist responds to an audience question
(http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/annenberg_hyperlinking_in_web_1.
html):
I get at least one email a week from a college student who says he got an
F citing Wikipedia. I write back saying, "For God's sake, you're in college.
Why are you citing an encyclopedia?" We tell people to be aware of what
it is. It's pretty good but any particular page could have been edited five
minutes ago, incorporating a new error. It's generally "good enough."
(Weinberger, 2006).

9. Wikis can be an evaluation challenge. In many edit histories, contributions are
more likely to be identified by silly screen names than academic credentials. As
students evaluate wikis, they might ask a few questions:
• What is the purpose of the collaborative project and who began it?
• How many people appear to be involved in editing the wiki? Does it seem
that the information collected is improved by having a variety of
participants? How heavily edited were the pages you plan to use?
• How rich is the wiki? How many pages does it contain?
• Does the project appear to be alive? Are folks continuing to edit it?
• Does the information appear accurate? Can I validate it in other sources?
Social responsibility and information ethics
These fluencies involve contributing positively to the learning community,
practicing ethical and responsible behavior regarding information and information
technology, recognizing the principles of intellectual freedom, respecting
intellectual property, and ensuring equitable information access.
It’s increasingly tough to model respect for intellectual property in a world of shift
and change, in a world of mixing and mashing, in a world of ubiquitous sharing,
casual online communication, and pirating. Debate continues to rage regarding
how to balance users’ needs for access to information while protecting the rights
of content creators to profit from their labor. It is far bigger than our classrooms.
Students are rightly confused and frustrated. The Pew Internet & American Life
study, Teen Content Creators and Consumers, quoted researcher Mary Madden
in its press release (http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/press_release.asp).
Today’s online teens have grown up amidst the chaos of the digital
copyright debate, and it shows. . .At a time when social norms around
digital content don’t always appear to conform with the letter of the law,
many teens are aware of the restrictions on copyrighted material, but
believe it’s still permissible to share some content for free. (Lenhart &
Madden, 2005, Press release)
Can we create a climate of information ethics? Can we guide students to
behavior that is fair and just and respectful of intellectual property without
compromising their creativity and enthusiasm? Today, a single student project
might incorporate downloaded video clips, music, and art, as well as quoted text.
It is also likely to be broadcast.
When projects stayed in our classrooms, limiting the amount of borrowed content
and simple documentation were generally enough for students to ethically use
the creative work of others. Limited use of the works of others in any media

10. generally fell under the guidelines of educational Fair Use. With students
regularly publishing and broadcasting beyond classroom walls, they need to take
greater care and use new strategies when they borrow the creative works of
others. On the Web, it is not always possible to get permission from or even
identify a content creator.
Multimedia authoring and Web-based learning are way bigger and far more
common then they were back when the Fair Use Guidelines for Multimedia
(http://www.ccumc.org/copyright/ccguides.html) were created in 1996. This
document, as well as CONFU: The Conference
on Fair Use, with its Rules of Thumb and Four Factor Fair Use Test
http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/confu.htm, describe how
educators and students may use copyrighted materials in limited ways.
We can help by teaching students about the Guidelines when they produce and
post media. We can ease some of the confusion by teaching students about the
new flexible protections and freedoms made possible by Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/ licensing. While the “Big C” means permission is
usually necessary for students to publish or broadcast content created by others,
Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ presents a “some rights
reserved” model. The nonprofit site shares a “flexible range of protections and
freedoms” that allows authors, musicians, visual artists, and educators to share
their work while maintaining ownership and copyright. The Creative Commons
website features two comics, as well as Get Creative, a video describing the
White Stripes’ approach to sharing their music without intermediaries
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/. These resources are designed
to help explain the new licensing concepts to learners, educators, and content
creators.
We can guide students to use the resources linked to on the Creative Commons
site, to public domain resources, and to the growing number of copyright-friendly
portals where individuals are choosing to share their own video, audio, images,
and more. (Here’s a starter list from our website
http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/cfimages.html).
The great conversation that is developing knowledge is not limited by geography
or culture. Learners now have global reach. They are likely to be interested in
using content created beyond the borders of their country and their limited legal
understandings. How do the laws regarding copyright translate across multiple
borders? We need to watch the work of the World Intellectual Property
Organization http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en .
Even simple documentation is complicated by the fact that the official style books
have not kept up with students’ new array of information choices. If we expect
ethical behavior, we have to make it less painful for learners who want to behave
ethically. Even before the examples hit the standard style manuals, we should

11. facilitate students’ ethical behavior by adapting and modeling citation formats for
blogs and wikis and podcasts and whatever is coming next. Interactive citation
tools have been around for some time and do help students keep up with the
shifting formats between formal print editions. Debbie and Damon Abilock’s
NoodleBib teaches about information options as it generates citations. This
summer NoodleBib added an interactive note card generator. David Warlick’s
Son of Citation Machine http://citationmachine.net/ offers guidance for the new
communication tools as well.
Blog space appears rife with confusion about linking to and posting the creative
materials of others. An About.com interview with intellectual property experts and
law bloggers Kimberlee Weatherall and Eugene Volokh offers 14 Copyright Tips
for Bloggers
http://weblogs.about.com/od/issuesanddiscussions/a/copyrighttips.htm
The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and a variety of prestigious university law clinics, offers explanation
of intellectual property in the digital information landscape.
Cyberjournalist.net offers A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php, a document well worth
discussing with student bloggers. David Warlick posts and discusses his own
proposed A Student & Teacher Information Code of Ethics on his 2 Cents Worth
Blog http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/08/23/getting-right-down-to-it/
Social responsibility is also about etiquette. I’ve taken to asking audiences to
“blog kindly” when I present. Many of my colleagues (and I) are stung by the
words of defamatory bloggers who write with unnecessary venom about
something we said or something we wore. Bloggers do not have editors.
Bloggers blog fast. Rash thoughts may be posted before a blogger really chews
on an idea, before emotion subsides, before rational thought has time to take
over. In classroom blogs, learners should argue and debate and criticize, but
they also should be sensitive and respectful. As teachers, we can inspire a
degree of impulse control for learners who blog.
While disagreement is evident, much of the online discussion relating to blogging
ethics considers the following guidelines. Bloggers should:
• credit their sources,
• check their facts,
• admit when they discover they have made a mistake,
• avoid harming others,
• and disclose their biases
Some of the discussion rejects the notion that we need a code of ethics.
Regardless of how strongly we feel or do not feel about guidelines for this
changing and more casual writing environment, as teachers, we have some
ability to shape its development in academics. I would like to see the next

12. generation of adult bloggers treat each other with courtesy and respect. Simply
having the discussion is important.
Social responsibility extends to interactions wikis, as well. In class wikis, we may
need to discuss and establish guidelines for how we modify information and
negotiate content. Guidelines for wiki construction could be class-generated,
with the wiki’s about page serving as a kind of charter for behavior, trust,
accountability, and contribution. These guidelines should serve to build the
culture of the wiki. Even in an open authorship environment, participants should
see both their freedoms and responsibilities to the community.
Lessons in social responsibility extend to the personal use of MySpace and other
social networking spaces. Employers and admissions offices now regularly check
“credentials” on social networking sites just as they do the credentials on
students’ applications and resumes. All things being equal they may just pass on
the kid with the beer, the joint, or the skimpy t-shirt. The students we care about
need to know this.
This social responsibility standard also relates to democratic access to
information. Teachers and librarians can act to prevent the growth of an
information underclass. Students need to learn about accessible alternatives to
commercial software. Teachers and librarians can guide learners to open source
options and proliferating web-based applications. (Here’s our library’s list for
students and teachers http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/opensource.html/.)
As teachers and librarians, we too have responsibilities. While we look out for
the safety of our students, we must also protect their access to the information
and communication tools they need to learn effectively. We must speak up
against school and government initiatives that prevent access to critical tools.
Synthesis and organization
This fluency involves the ability to see information patterns, to analyze
information, to organize ideas, and to effectively weave together ideas from
multiple sources to create a coherent new whole.
Web 2.0 presents the ultimate opportunity for teaching synthesis. Students who
effectively use Web 2.0 tools, synthesize effectively.
Wikis promote a jigsaw style in which learners can divide a research task and
share individual expertise and insights to complete an information gathering task
or answer a driving question. They may be one of the best tools for helping
students to learn how to collaborate and build text-based knowledge as they
incorporate information from multiple sources, consider diverse ideas, learn how
to edit, integrate feedback, and negotiate the content of multiple authors.
Additionally, peer collaboration and distributed authorship remove some of the

13. “drama” associated with top-down assessment. Wikis shift the onus of correction
and improvement from the teacher to the community. Teachers can assess the
work of the group, as well as individual contributors to the wiki community
through its history pages. Bernie Dodge’s Design Patterns for EduWikis
http://edwiki.org/mw/index.php/Design_Patterns_for_EduWikis offers strategies
for designing thoughtful wiki synthesis projects.
Blogging is also essentially about synthesis, with emphasis on the blogger’s
voice as he or she engages in dialog and debate. Bloggers must ask such
questions as: Based on my information mission, what do I choose to post? How
do I respond to, analyze, interpret, personalize the ideas of others? How do I
build new knowledge synthesizing my own ideas with those of the community
and with what I have been reading?
Blogs foster the kind of risk-taking writing that may not happen in the traditional
five-paragraph essay. In this new form of public writing, students can share ideas
before they are fully formed and solicit and use the ideas of others as they clarify
build their own. Bloggers learn to connect with audience, to express their
messages in concise space and in more conversational tone. Bloggers learn to
weave their own voices into personal, unique communication products,
developed over the course of time.
New media projects as digital storytelling, inherently involve synthesis as
learners select and weave words, images, sound, and video together into a
coherent composition to conveying meaning, knowledge, and personal
perspective. Using editing tools like: iMovie, Final Cut, and Garage Band,
students compose and share original media, incorporating the relevant ideas and
creations of others. If we are to teach synthesis in a 21st century landscape, we
need new strategies for encouraging and assessing synthesis in these innovation
creations.
Regardless of the format of the final knowledge product, drafting, outlining,
graphing, storyboarding are essential stages in the process of examining
information patterns and synthesizing knowledge. The commercial tool
Inspiration (http://inspiration.com) has long been a strategy to help students
collect and organize information and restructure knowledge. New tools like
FreeMind and Gliffy http://www.gliffy.com/ , offer learners similar features. Web-
based tools like Writely (http://www.writely.com/) and ZohoWriter
http://www.zohowriter.com promote written collaborations by allowing the online
editing of documents.
We have new tools for aggregating knowledge. Teachers can help to synthesize
the work of their classes, or other relevant blogs, on a SupreGlu page
(http://suprglu.com/)-- or by collecting RSS feeds--modeling approaches students
themselves might take in aggregating their own research.

14. Communicating new knowledge
This fluency involves seeking excellence in knowledge generation, collaborating,
and contributing positively to learning community.
What’s changed in terms of communication of knowledge? Web 2.0 is the
perfect sandbox for our students to authentically hone this information fluency.
We’ve always worked to inspire students to improve their writing, research and
communication skills. Web 2.0 shifts writing and composition in critical and
exciting ways. Web 2.0 means audience. Learners now have the potential for a
truly authentic and globally connected audience. Learners are discovering real
reasons to research, to write, to tell their unique stories. They can use new
media tools to stream and share in ways that truly showcase their personal
talents. Learners are discovering that research can be collaborative, community-
based, media-rich, and exciting.
Writing, or public writing, doesn’t come naturally to all students. Through
classroom blogging, we are preparing students to write effectively and regularly
for many purposes, and for varying audiences. We are preparing them for the
types of blogs they will likely find in academics and business—for those blogs
that are used for project management, professional communication, customer
communication, and for college courses.
As we work toward inspiring effective student work and research in this new
landscape we will need to share new models. We will need to offer guidance
about what a thoughtful post looks like, for how we respond to the ideas of
others, for what energetic written dialog looks like, for how to develop a voice as
a writer. San Diego State University offers a Blog Reflection Rubric
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec296/assignments/blog_rubric.html that
values such criteria as: engaged writing, personal response to key concepts,
intellectual engagement with key concepts, and overall use. Other blog rubrics
value: response to other contributors, reflection, critical thinking, synthesis of
concepts, regularity and length of entries, attention to writing standards and
mechanics, and clarity. The trick in assessing student blogging, however, is
being able to maintain the excitement of personal writing while inspiring students
to refine ideas, to reflect and to think more critically.
Through their writing and research contributions in wikis, learners learn to
collaborate, to share responsibility as a team member, to create together. Wikis
represent a version of the peer review process for non-academics. In wikis,
students help each other as they grapple with such writing challenges precision
of word choice and accuracy.
In 2.0 space, the research process itself should become transparent.
Research blogs allow students to record, manage, and reflect on the entire
journey. In a research blog, students can explore potential research questions,
carefully craft thesis statements, annotate the most relevant, most reliable

15. resources for their projects. They can use the tool to build their evidence. Along
the way, they can elicit comments from the learning community—their peers,
outside mentors, and instructors. These checks limit the possibilities for research
holes and the omission of critical ideas. The resulting self-directed, but mediated
product, traces a student’s process and may continue to exist, posted as a
pathfinder to guide other researchers
We piloted this strategy with last year seniors as they attacked the culminating
research project of their choice. Our pilot research blog experience was
successful but will be improved this coming year with great interactivity. This is
our model for this year’s senior projects: http://researchlogtemplate.edublogs.org/
Communication in the future will likely be increasingly collaborative,
geographically agnostic, and multimodal. But even when paradigms shift, some
things stay the same. Those who can use information to communicate effectively
have clear professional and academic advantage. The learner and the worker of
the future must be able to ask the important questions, use information create
thoughtful and compelling arguments, back their arguments with solid evidence,
make decisions and reach conclusions. This type of brain work may result in a
streamed multimedia presentation or a digital story. It may also result in a formal
corporate white paper posted as a PDF.
I want my students to be fluent for all information formats-- traditional, current
and emerging. They should be able to identify a wide array of information and
communication strategies and choose the ones that best meet their needs. But
wherever the information they need lives, whatever the vehicle they choose for
communication, they will be more successful if they can weave some sturdy old
threads into the fabric of their communication. They will be more successful if
they can effectively and ethically access, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate
in whatever version of “Web” we experience. Teachers and librarians together
can prepare learners to produce work that will last the test of time.
Information Literacy Links
AASL/ AECT Information Literacy Standards for Student Learners
http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslproftools/informationpower/InformationLiteracySta
ndards_final.pdf
ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Students
http://cnets.iste.org/students/s_stands.html
Partnership for 21st Century Skills http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/
References

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