WebWorld

Communication and Information Resources

Homepage

Resources

News Service

News

Communication and Information Sector's news service

The eighth UNESCO Training-the-Trainers workshop in Information Literacy concluded in Seville, Spain

03-11-2008 (Seville)

Workshops logo
© N. Erol Olcay

The eighth UNESCO Training-the-Trainers Workshop in Information Literacy was held from 27 to 29 October 2008 at the Library of Andalusia in Granada, Spain, and concluded last week at the Foundation ‘Three Cultures of the Mediterranean’ in Seville, Spain.

The workshop was one in the series of 11 regional workshops organized by UNESCO within the framework of its global project to “train the trainers” in information literacy and therefore enable people to reap the full benefits of the emerging knowledge societies.

Information literacy is a means to empower people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use and create information effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals.

The workshop focused on developing a model to introduce information literacy within educational institutions such as schools and universities. The participants concluded that the ideal model is to acquire a combination of skills, competencies, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours. The introduction of such a model should be based on a close collaboration between teachers, librarians and students in order to change their personal and interpersonal interaction patterns. For example:

Teachers must shift from classic professorial modes to become facilitators, that is to say to become knowledge providers to knowledge managers, instructors to team leaders, to offer guidelines instead of just lectures, to develop close relationships with their students, and to promote greater diversity of ideas and participation of students in the learning process;
Librarians must shift from technical work to intermediation, from isolation to collaboration, from conservation to innovation and from reactive user-trainer modes to proactive teacher-trainer modes;
Students must shift from individual learning to group learning, from reactive audience to proactive participants, from dependency to independency, and from temporary and intermittent learning to life-long learning.

In the 21st century’s rapidly changing and highly competitive environment, the concept of information literacy becomes clearly a central element because it enables people to acquire the skills and abilities to learn how to learn, and to constantly update and challenge their existing knowledge.

UNESCO, with its mandate to help all people access information and knowledge they need to improve their daily lives, has taken a lead role to foster information literacy worldwide.