Info Lit 2.0 or Deja Vu?

Abstract

In 1999, ACRL convened a national task force to draft Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. ACRL has recently launched a revision to those standards. The original standards were influential because they helped advance a national need in higher education at the time: a shift to outcomes based learning. Fourteen years later, information literacy stands alongside oral and written communication, critical thinking and ethical reasoning as learning outcomes broadly acknowledged as needing to be integrated, with disciplinary content, into the curriculum. This author believes that, in contrast to the first process, the current recommendations for revision are focused on the wrong question and include the wrong people to address it. The point isn't to further define, redefine and write more, less or different learning outcomes. The challenge now is to move ahead and address the current concerns of education reform: vertical integration with disciplinary knowledge, curriculum mapping, and assessment. There are a host of challenges and libraries and librarians are perfectly poised to help.

Keywords

• information literacy
• standards
• ACRL