Sources: Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners
Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners. By Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2014. 248 p. Paper $65 (ISBN: 978-1-55570-989-1).
Transliteracy, visual literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, mobile literacy—there has been a struggle for years to define how technology changes the way people understand and use information. For academic librarians, information literacy has been the approach of choice. In one-shot sessions and semester-long courses, we teach students how to determine what information is needed and how to find it, evaluate it, and use it ethically. In Metaliteracy, the authors argue that information literacy as a concept needs to be updated because it does not reflect the effects that social media and open learning have had on students and their interactions with information. Students no longer are mere consumers of information, and metaliteracy recognizes this. It reaches beyond information literacy to encompass the skills students demonstrate when actively participating in online communities, such as collaborating with others, producing information, and sharing the results.
The opening chapters provide the theoretical context for metaliteracy. These sections are meticulously researched, and the authors' scholarship in this area is evident. These chapters might not be easily accessible to the general reader, but they provide a thorough background for subsequent chapters. The authors follow the transformation of the information environment by social media and open learning and explain how this transformation led them to articulate the metaliteracy concept. They explore how metaliteracy relates to its antecedent literacies, such as transliteracy and digital literacy, and they compare the characteristics of each to the scope of this new form of literacy. Most importantly, the authors define learning goals for the metaliterate learner. These goals are designed to help students become lifelong learners prepared to adapt to technology's frenetic pace of change and its effects on how information is created and used.
The latter part of the book demonstrates how metaliteracy can be applied in the classroom. Case studies follow the evolution of traditional information literacy courses as they incorporate the participatory possibilities of social media and media-creation tools, such as Prezi and Animoto. Having students create media in the classroom and interact online are not new ideas, but some creative approaches—such as having students investigate the rationale behind removing a YouTube video for copyright violations—provide some interesting twists.
Author Trudi Jacobson is co-chair on the task force currently working on the new Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education being created by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and for those following the process, Metaliteracy will provide a solid grounding in some of the principles incorporated in the framework. As a whole, the book could have benefitted from using more accessible language to clarify this new approach to thinking about information, but the exhaustive research that went into its writing allows it to serve as a reference resource for this reimagining of what literacy means.—Ann Agee, School of Library and Information Science Librarian, San Jose State University, San Jose, California