Critical Issues for Information Literacy at Williams
In creating an information literacy plan, the following critical issues need to be considered:
- Belief on the part of students and, to some extent, faculty that computer competency equals information literacy competency.
- Faculty belief that someone else is teaching information literacy skills, so they don't need to do so in their courses.
- Perceived difficulty of adding information literacy sessions into a course with lots of content to cover.
- Williams does not have a single course or type of course with common goals that all students take where information literacy skills could be integrated. (e.g. a writing course, first year seminar)
- Challenges of course-integrated instructional approach (our current approach):
- Does not reach all students.
- No sequencing, so students end up getting basic instruction multiple times.
- Based on individual faculty commitment, not a departmental or institutional commitment.
- Because instruction is based on individual faculty requests, instruction is randomly dispersed across the curriculum.
- The amount of instruction varies from year to year depending on what courses faculty supporters teach and whether they are on leave.
