Aspects Concerning Information Literacy in the 21st Century

The researchers based their studies on information literacy around the following questions: A) How to organize and implement better solutions that will enable a greater number of people to acquire the necessary information literacy skills? and B) What is the role of information literacy and what are the possible pitfalls? Concerning the first issue, the authors propose a standard for the information literacy skills certification as an extension of the already existing computer literacy ECDL/ICDL standard. Such a combined standard can be included in the regular university curriculum, based on the experience of already successful implementation of the ECDL standard as a university course Introduction to Informatics. For the second issue which is a more philosophical one, the authors draw some parallel between Internet, as a source of information, and older radio and TV broadcasting technologies, concluding that there is a significant danger that each new and promising technology, after passing the challenging, difficult and inspiring pioneering phase, becomes boring and over-commercialized. There is a hope that awareness of such danger will help to avoid it.