Information Fluency Working Definition

An important challege facing liberal arts education today is to anticipate how emerging technologies will change the traditional ways we have taught and learned.

We believe one of the best ways to address the challenge is by bringing the faculty, librarians, and IT staff together to develop a common understanding of the task before us. One of our goals is to find ways to guide our students in becoming adept at using the varied types and sources of information available to them in productive and responsible ways in their learning; in other words, to become information fluent. To that end, we provide the following definition.

• Collect the information necessary to consider a problem or issue
• Employ critical thinking skills in the evaluation and analysis of the information and its sources
• Formulate logical conclusions and present those conclusions in an appropriate and effective way

Information Fluency may be envisioned as the optimal outcome when critical thinking skills are combined with information literacy and relevant computing skills.