Information literacy and online learning for secondary school and internal tertiary students under COVID-19

My son is 15, doing NCEA level 1 this year.  He is now learning at home, navigating his workload independently using materials provided by his teachers. It is indeed a strange way of learning for him and his peers and...

PISA’s warning: teachers need to teach Information Literacy explicitly if we are to reverse the decline

On December 03rd 2019, Stuff news reported on the results of the 2018 round of the OECD’s PISA(1) testing in Reading Literacy, Mathematics Literacy and Science Literacy(2). The article noted the consistent downward trends in achievement, since 2012, of New...

Connecting Digital Citizenship and Information Literacy: Part 1 of 2

In 2018, the Ministry of Education introduced the Digital Strategy and Curriculum into New Zealand schools for Years 1-13. The digital technologies curriculum combines skills for using electronic devices and hardware as well as supporting students to develop as thinkers,...

That Was Then….

As a sole charge librarian, my daily routine before involvement in this project would have included any or all of the following tasks: Cataloguing and processing of resources Issuing and returning of books Planning and setting up displays Shelf tidying...

The definition of information literacy – how much does it matter?

I work in the School of Psychology, and a group of us who do similar research meet each week to discuss topics of shared interest. Recently we discussed this article titled What is cognition? The article provides a range of...

Old fiddles can play good tunes: essential information literacy skills of the 1990s are those of 2020s

Earlier this week I rediscovered the Essential Skills Assessments: Information Skills (ESA:IS) (2001) teacher’s manual and the accompanying CD of tests (photo) sitting in the bottom of the book shelf for at least the last 10 years.  The tests were...

Of mice, librarians and geography teachers

My involvement in the Information Literacy Spaces (ILS) project has been an interesting mix of success, failure, frustration, and procrastination, along with opening my eyes to this area. As we enter the last half year of this research project I’d like...

Māori Performing Arts students achieve high NCEA grades by learning how to use traditional knowledge and contemporary academic information sources

Ka whakarērea te puha, ka whai te matariki. The inferior reeds are thrown away, the superior ones are sought after When one hears the term ‘deficit theorising’ one immediately thinks of students not being given an equal opportunity due to...

A Tale of Two Classes: Information Literacy Skills Matter in Geography

Actually, in 2018, it was more like a tale of two and a half Geography classes. Timetable clashes with Chemistry and Digital Technology meant that six of my top Geography students from 2017 couldn’t take the subject at Level 2...