Information Literacy : Essential Skills for the Information Age Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Not Very Informative for a Book on Information Literacy!
Review: I have read several chapters of this now and I am finding that most of what I am reading so far is extremely repetitive. I was very excited to get this book at first and to have the promise of a potentially comprehensive source to explain and explore the theoretical and practical aspects of up-to-date Information Literacy issues and impacts as well as future predictions, especially as it pertains to LIS and K-12.

However, so far this book is not saying anything that couldn't be summed up better in much shorter informational segments and paragraphs. It seems the authors go on and on and provide too many definitions of the same thing in different ways again and again. I think I am going to have to call this one a potentially intellectually fraudulent scam all the more ironic since it is supposed to be about perveying literate and good, not redundant information!

It is redundant and completely fails to hit its points home. I had the most hope for Chapter 9 on Information Technologies and I find this to be sadly lacking in any kind of even surface level touch on the impacts and uses of current technologies in information literacy today. I guess I was expecting a more robust indoctrination of the kinds of technologies and markup, semantic and more that educators and information professionals should know now to move into the realm of truly "informed" information integration, portability, and accessibility across a variety of media, ie the languages they should speak...

This book does state that being information literate relies on being in the know about good sources and correct uses/impacts of informational technologies...but as far as being a good source itself, referencing explicitly the kind of technologies and the means to access them this book doesn't seem so far to amount too much I can take away and get my hands dirty with, and this is a failure to me because how can I use it on the job? Conceptually I do not feel that 10 chapters are needed to express and define the concept of information literacy.

So in short I guess I have to say this book is great in theory, but in practice leaves little or nothing for the practioner to take away. I will go back over several chapters again as I was certainly hoping to get more out of it, and I spent $50 on this thing! But I think I want my money back - this just doesn't give me as much as it took away...and that is a sad statement on any book from my bibliophiliac perspective!!! Just my 2 bits!

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