Jun 02 2009
Information Literacy in the workplace
Couple of interesting questions in Bonnie Cheuk’s weblog posed by Mark Hepworth - why do people generally shy away from thinking about how they learn and why do organisations seem unwilling or don’t appreciate the need to spend time and money developing people’s information literacy and information management skills i.e. their information processing capacity?
As Bonnie goes on to say that in her opinion “they do not ‘shy away’, they just don’t think about it, this is what they do ‘naturally’” However for those involved or interested in learning whether in education, the workplace or any learning environment it is important that we understand about learning.
The second questions is a question that I’m sure those interested or involved in information literacy in any workplace / organisation has asked themselves or others. Bonnie says that “I think this is because all knowledge workers are expected to have certain level of skills to process and use information, this is what they do everyday (but they may not be calling it information literacy/management skills).” I would go further and say that managers implicitly expect all workers not just knowledge workers to have the skills to process and use information and that these skills are acquired whilst in education.
To read more on her thoughts about the later question she has a paper in Libri: http://www.librijournal.org/2008-3toc.html Delivering Business Value through Information Literacy in the Workplace
