COVID-19 and the Information Literacy Crisis

摘要

The pandemic of 2020 has taught us many things about ourselves, our roles in life, and the fragility/resilience of higher education. As we move through this process, my reflections on some of the information literacy challenges that have been put into special focus by education's shift from face-to-face to online include how it has affected students, faculty, and the world at large. For many, many years, I have been putting forward the following messages: "The information literacy gap is the biggest blind spot in higher education today," and "A student who is not information-literate is not an educated student." I've watched the infolit movement grow and become mainstream in academic libraries, while recognition of the information literacy gap has shown painfully slow growth among academics. Research ability development is still peripheral to the mainstream educational process.