Strategic And Collaborative Approaches For Fostering Information Literacy Via An Information Portal

Proliferation of information in varying formats and amounts has made the contemporary era 'information intensive' with manifold choices to information access and retrieval. Sheer abundance of information and technology would not in itself create more informed learners without a complementary understanding of and capacity to use information effectively. Unless the learners are information literate, they will be deficient in skills to locate, retrieve, organise, and evaluate critically the retrieved information and use it effectively for personal as well as professional accomplishments. Information literacy (IL) empowers one with task-accomplishing skills, in part by fluency with information technology, in part by sound investigative methods, but most important, through critical discernment and reasoning. IL certainly lays a robust foundation not only for lifelong learning but also for coping with the incessant socio-cultural and technological changes. Nurturing IL aims at developing learners' critical thinking and discernment about the whole gamut of e-information and its varying formats, prior to its consumption. This article focuses on the strategic and collaborative approaches desirable for fostering information literacy in academic setting via an information portal.