Information Literacy - Superb Bird of Paradise

Today A. watched a documentary about jungles.

He saw a Superb Bird of Paradise.

He asked what they eat, and wondered if they ate worms.

Mummy looked them up and found out that they live in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

They eat fruit such as yellow figs, and a variety of insects.

Information literacy is something that my family really values. I want my children to know what information they need, how to get it, to be able to figure out if the information they have is any good, and to be able to present information in ways that other people can use.

When my children don't know something I like to first get them to make a guess at the answer, but as they grow I expect them more and more to know where to go to find that information. This starts off with me modelling the ways that I find information - books, the internet, videos, people who know more than me.

My children have some ideas about how information is stored. S. is only 3 but he knows you can look things up in books. He isn't expert enough to know the difference between fiction and non-fiction and he still has the habit of picking up adult fiction novels with great pictures on the front. I recall him picking a novel because it had a picture of an orange on the front, and one with a person driving a car. "I looking up CARS!" he declared. Children first play with ideas and approximate what they see around them... this is how we first experience adult ideas, "heuristically" - through trial and error.

Only when they get more expert will they be able to unpack how what they have learned is important, or why. At the moment the alphabet is a song, or a game... but soon enough it will be a valuable tool for hunting through the index of a book, or looking up a word in a dictionary... because, realistically, they aren't going to be completely relying on Google to do that for them. They may be digital natives, but not everything is on the internet, especially the more esoteric stuff.

Sometimes I fear that my children have too many answers at their fingertips - that somehow by letting "the cloud" do the thinking they may just not bother to retain information for themselves. In the day and age where we rely on our GPS to navigate us around town do we actually learn how to get where we are going, and form internal mind maps of our location? Will we be lost if the electrics fritz out and we are left to make out way blind... or will we just use the GPS on our phone, or call roadside assistance?

That's one reason why information literacy is so important in this day and age. Things are changing so fast that we don't know what the world our children or grandchildren live in is going to be like. We need to prepare them not for the world as it is, but give them the skills they need to adapt to a world as it will be... before it changes again. We need our children to have a very sophisticated skill-set if they hope to navigate seas of information, full of opinion, spin, bias, half-truth, sensationalism, fact, fiction... lies.