50 Shades of Information Literacy - viewing information literacy as a multifaceted reasoning skill

Interesting blog posting titled '50 Shades of Information Literacy" by Donna Witek

"Information literacy can be found hidden in every corner of every discipline out there. It’s not always called information literacy and it does not always look the same. In that way, information literacy is very similar to complex reasoning skills. And some would argue that they are in fact the same.

If you think about it, every discipline requires a certain set of reasoning skills. On a broad level, these skills fall under the umbrella of inductive and deductive reasoning. But under that umbrella, you’ll find an enormous subset of reasoning skills. There’s social reasoning, legal reasoning, conditional reasoning, statistical reasoning, creative reasoning, academic reasoning, critical reasoning, historical reasoning, et al… And when you delve into the details of each reasoning skill, what do you find? Something that resembles information literacy. In other words, information literacy is a multifaceted reasoning skill. There are many shades of information literacy ..."

Donna provides as an example a historical reasoning model which she suggests could easily serve as a model for information literacy. I would have thought it is more of a faceted part of a model.

I have always viewed information literacy as multifaceted operating in different information environemnts / landscapes and certainly part of problem solving and critical thinking - the later of which Donna talks about in response to a question / comment on her posting.