Abstract

The faces of immigrant children who had come through Ellis Island with their parents in search of better futures stare out at me from a set of black and white photographs near my desk. The children, frozen in time, are lined up for blocks, waiting for the doors of a public library to open. Access to information was their pathway to a future of hope and promise. Many years have passed since then, but the need to guide new generations of children toward a promising future is just as much of a challenge today as it was then. The new challenge faced by educators today is created by the very environment in which today's children live and learn. It is a world with an overabundance--indeed, a tidal wave--of information that bombards them from the time they turn on the television in the morning to the moment they turn off the computer before they go to sleep. Without a doubt, these young people are far more awash in information than their parents were. However, neither all of this information, nor their ease with the computers and Internet that bring much of it to them, are translating into better-educated and informed college graduates or more competent and efficient workers. What went wrong? Why haven't these technological enthusiasts evolved into an extraordinary American workforce? This article evaluates the answers to these questions in the following sections: The New Literacy; What Is Information Literacy?; and Information Literacy in the Work World. A brief list of resources is also included.

Citation

Breivik, P.S. (2005). 21st Century Learning and Information Literacy. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 37(2),. Retrieved August 12, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/98164/.

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Keywords

• Access to Information
• computer literacy
• Computer Uses in Education
• higher education
• information literacy
• information technology
• internet
• Job Skills