Information Literacy
There are three major sections on this page:
Choose one of the sections that’s most relevant to your situation, read that section, and complete one learning activity in the section.
Finding Information
Outside of your academic work, you may do research in a number of different ways, even if your current job does not directly involve research. You might research:
- job requirements and openings if you’re looking for a change
- news articles related to a particular subject that interests you
- information about the latest social media in order to understand what your children are using
- medical information about potential side effects of a drug your doctor wants to prescribe
- and more…
In a climate in which there is free-flowing information from a variety of sources online, it’s more important than ever to look for sources appropriate to your purpose and needs. For example, it may be fine to do a Google search to ask about current social media trends, which would likely result in a number of current, general articles. But you’d want to find authoritative articles when researching drug side effects – you’d want the Mayo Clinic as opposed to John Doe’s personal post.
Read Grand Canyon University’s page on What Is Digital Literacy? for more insight on finding information in the current environment.
Finding information is a competency where there’s a direct correspondence between academic, work, and life skills. For example, successful professionals maintain currency in their fields. One way of maintaining currency is to read journals in your field, which are written for professional practitioners (as opposed to magazines written for the general public). Journals can help you keep track of trends, current controversies, and new developments, and as such can foster your professional development.
You can find articles in professional journals through database searches.
The video below explains the difference between finding sources with general information and sources with authoritative information. The presenter uses the term “scholarly research,” since the video was created for university students, but think of “scholarly research” as the process finding “authoritative sources” in any context.
This video defines and provides tips for doing a database search.
Learning Activity for Finding Information
Introductory Level
Do a database search to find two professional journals that might be useful to you in your profession, or given your professional interests.
Then analyze two recent issues of each journal. Review the contents, and read a few articles from each issue fully and carefully.
As a result of your reading, write a review of each journal. (Write two reviews.) In each review, answer the following questions:
- Who is the journal’s specific audience?
- Does the journal focus on any specific type of article? (e.g., original research, reflective pieces, professional debates, etc.)
- Based on your review of the content, are there any particular biases in the journal? If so, please describe.
- What is the relevance of the journal to you as a professional? How important is the journal’s type of information to your everyday work? How can you envision consulting this journal in the future?
In addition, summarize one of the articles you read in depth. Summarizing is a useful professional skill, especially when you’re applying information from your research to make your point in a discussion, report, or business proposal.
At the end of the summary, make sure to include citation information to identify the article and journal. If you need to review how to write a summary, access the Summarizing page from an open textbook on college writing.
Submit:
- 2 reviews, one for each journal
- 1 summary of one article
Learning Activity for Finding Information
Advanced Level
Identify a topic you’d like to research, something related to your profession, daily life, or interests. Then develop a research question about that topic following the process presented in the video below. Note that although the video discusses the concept of “research question” in terms of writing an academic research paper, the process is the same for any topic you need to research, in any context.
Make sure to evaluate your research question before you start your research. For example, the research question “What do people eat in Vietnam?” is not a useful research question, because it does not contain a “why?” or “how?” question and it can be answered in a few simple sentences. On the other hand, the research questions “How does Vietnamese food reflect values in Vietnamese culture?,” or “How does Vietnamese cuisine reflect a history of colonialism?” are useful research questions, because they will require some analysis and level of complexity to answer.
Once you have developed your research question, search databases to find five articles that directly answer your research question.
Read the articles, and then create an annotated bibliography which includes the full citation for each article, followed by your own summary and analysis. You can read/view information about creating an annotated bibliography using the following sources:
- Cornell University Library’s How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography
- University of Maryland University College’s Writing the Annotated Bibliography
- Purdue Online Writing Lab’s Annotated Bibliography Samples
Submit: your research question, annotated bibliography, and a brief assessment of how this learning activity went – What did you learn? What went and/or did not go well? How might you use an annotated bibliography in other situations?
Evaluating Information
Evaluating Information is an important part of research; it’s also a critical thinking skill. When you find information you then need to evaluate it in order to make sure it’s valid information from an appropriate source.
Read the Brooklyn Public Library’s page What is Information Literacy? to get an overview of what’s involved in evaluating and using information.
The two main characteristics you should look for in a source are suitability and trustworthiness.
Suitable & Trustworthy Sources:
- contain facts/opinions/illustrations/data that support and directly relate to your focus
- attempt to offer information in an unbiased way
- were created by an authority or expert
- offer current information, if currency is important to your focus
- carefully cite the sources they used
Unsuitable & Untrustworthy Sources:
- are not related, or are only tangentially related, to your focus
- try to persuade by relying on bias, emotion, or tactics other than logic
- have unknown authors (as with some websites) or authors who are not knowledgeable in the field in which they are writing
- are out of date; do not reflect current viewpoints in the field, if currency is important to your focus
- do not cite the sources they used
View the following video, which clearly identifies a variety of questions to ask in order to evaluate sources.
Learning Activity for Evaluating Information
Introductory Level
Develop a research question – see the section on this page on Finding Information. Then research an answer using four different types of sources:
- a general online encyclopedia, such as Wikipedia
- a website sponsored by a professional organization
- an article in a general interest magazine
- an article in a scholarly journal
Analyze the type of information in each source for suitability and trustworthiness.
Submit:
- your topic
- a list of your four sources, cited appropriately
- your analysis of each source
- a brief discussion of how you might — or why you might not — use each of these sources in a particular professional situation
Learning Activity for Evaluating Information
Advanced Level
Read the article “Eating Meat for the Environment,” by Lisa Hamilton.
Analyze the information in this article in terms of suitability and trustworthiness. Note that this article was written as a general interest piece, not as a scholarly one.
In a short (4-5 page) evaluation, explain what would need to be 1) addressed and 2) added if the author wanted to turn this into a suitable, trustworthy, logical article for a scholarly journal.
In addition to your evaluation, create two pieces of information to be added as though you were the author and were revising this piece, for two of the items you identified as needing to be addressed or added.
Explain where you found the information you added and how you determined that your sources were suitable trustworthy.
Submit:
- evaluation of what would be needed to turn this into an article for a scholarly journal
- example addressing two of the items needed
- explanation of where you found the information and validation of your sources
Using AI
Generative AI has changed the landscape of information literacy. You can use AI to identify the types of sources you need to find. You can use it to summarize main ideas from sources. You can use it to simplify professional jargon into more understandable, everyday language. You can use it to cite sources. You can use it to refine your research question. There are more and more uses developing as we speak, as AI grows more powerful and humans use it analytically and creatively.
However, simply learning how to use AI does not constitute AI literacy. You need to understand something about how it works and what it can and cannot do in order to start developing AI literacy.
Read:
Grand Canyon University’s page on What is Digital Literacy?
Rod Trent’s blog post on Why AI Literacy Isn’t Just for Tech Gurus – It’s for Everyone (note that although this is a personal blog post, the author is a MicroSoft senior program manager)
AI’s own analysis of What Generative AI Can and Cannot Do.
In AI’s own analysis, note that AI is “soft” on its own drawbacks. It is not private, since it draws data from anything you input. (There are ways of ensuring more privacy in certain versions of different AI tools.)
AI often hallucinates, or makes things up, and includes major errors. It creates fake sources, inaccurate citations, and biased information.
It also may include information it plagiarized from sources, without attributing that information to its source.
Given the way AI communicates, it sounds factual and accurate, which is dangerous for an uninformed user.
However, Generative AI is a tool that’s here to stay, a tool that is getting more powerful and more embedded in work and daily life. So you need to learn how to be an informed user.
Learning Activity for AI Use
Introductory Level
This is a three-part activity.
Part 1
Identify a work-related topic that you know about. You have been asked to train others in this topic.
- Write an outline for training co-workers on this topic.
- Explain why you made the choices you made in your outline, given your experience with the topic, your organization, and your co-workers.
Part 2
- Use a general prompt to ask AI to write an outline for training co-workers on your topic. Retain your prompt and AI’s output.
- Use your explanation from part 1 of this learning activity to refine your general prompt and ask AI more specifically to write an outline for training co-workers in your topic. In this and any needed subsequent prompts, make specific the tacit knowledge you have about the particulars of the needed training (the context, the people) , until you get a usable outline from AI. Retain your prompt/s and AI’s output for each prompt.
Part 3
- Evaluate the assumptions and any biases in AI’s response to your general prompt (part 2, question 1).
- Discuss what you learned about creating prompts in AI from doing the more specific prompts.
Submit:
All three parts, including the AI prompts and outputs. Clearly label your work, AI’s output, each part, and the sections of each part.
Learning Activity for Using AI
Advanced Level
Add a Part 4 to the three parts of the introductory level activity above.
Part 4
- Ask AI to find five sources with information to help support and validate some of your points in your outline, with a quotation from each source. At least one of the sources should be a professional journal. Retain your prompts and AI’s output.
- Search each of the sources and quotations that AI provided. For each source and each quotation, determine validity and appropriateness.
- Discuss insights gained into AI and research.
Submit: All four parts, including the AI prompts and outputs. Please label each part and the sections of each part clearly.
