Teaching information literacy skills to social sciences students and practitioners

Visual literacy, defined here as the ability to recognize, interpret, evaluate, and create visual messages, is increasingly important for navigating daily life and for conducting effective research. Visual literacy enables us to critically assess the wide array of images that infuse our daily lives through such diverse media contexts as advertising, the web, television, video games, books, magazines, and museums. The need for information literacy instruction to target not only textual but also visual artifacts is growing rapidly. Since student projects increasingly involve multimedia presentations and require non-textual research sources, this increased demand for visual literacy has outpaced the development of lessons and classes to teach those skills.