Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of "Surfing Through Noise," a column in which I am covering what it means to be "information fluent" in our Digital/Information Age. Many of the practices, challenges and issues concerning information fluency can be applied to the online learning and teaching environment, where students and teachers learn basic information fluency skills (or advanced if they so choose) just by participating in an online course.

This is especially true within the context of our fluid and frequently changing digital/information society where new technologies and vehicles for disseminating information - podcasting, online social networking and book marking, the blogosphere, etc. - grow in usage and popularity seemingly overnight.

In their book "Higher Education in the Internet Age: Libraries Creating a Strategic Edge", Patricia Senn Breivik and E. Gordon Gee write that "the benefits of the Internet age carry with them a number of serious issues concerning quality of information, access, and commercialization of information, development and preservation of knowledge and student learning. We in higher education need to provide a meaningful framework for the various components of the expanding information base; we need to ensure open access to information; and we need to teach people how to choose wisely among the variety of information resources."

In August 2006, the University of Central Florida (UCF) officially launched an "Information Fluency Initiative" that emphasizes an across-the-curriculum practice. This initiative was born out of a UCF Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for a recent Commission of Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) reaffirmation of accreditation. It is an example of a large-scale project to infuse information fluency across the curriculum.

The initiative has kicked off inside four pilot programs: the Philosophy Department, the School of Nursing, a freshmen-level Strategies for Success course, and the UCF Burnett Honors College. Each of these pilots has its own strategies that entail collaborations between faculty, information literacy specialists from the UCF libraries, and staff from UCF’s Operational Excellence and Assessment Support unit, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Research Initiative for Teachning Effectiveness. Some of the goals include identifying and developing information-fluency-related student learning outcomes (SLOs) and measures inside key courses, and to revise these SLOs and measures continuously through regular review and approval processes. Based on data to be collected and analyzed through assessments, all four pilots will ultimately embed solid SLOs in a variety of their courses before the Fall 2009 semester.

In its first year of implementation, during Fall 2006, the Honors College, for instance, is collecting baseline data concerning students’ perceptions and attitudes about information fluency (e.g., how familiar are you with library databases), as well as administering several quizzes that are cognitive in nature, (e.g., identify key words for a specific query and use them in a variety of databases).

Once information-fluency-related SLOs have been fully developed through an analysis of a variety of assessment practices from all current and future pilots, it is hoped and expected that faculty throughout UCF will eventually incorporate information fluency pedagogies into their courses.

The UCF Information Fluency Initiative website has a downloadable PDF document addressed to students that has the following question and answer that succinctly places this initiative within its proper context:

"Information fluency is vital to university students’ academic achievements and professional successes and will contribute to their lifelong learning processes. Information fluent students are valuable to employers and corporations as they move beyond the university environment into the workplace. The ability to extrapolate useful concepts and ideas from existing information into new applications continues to be a crucial skill in the 21st Century work place."

When looking closely at the UCF initiative, it becomes clear that helping students become information fluent cannot be accomplished in one semester, or in one class, or in one’s academic career. This was explained to me by Craig Gibson, editor of the newly published "Student Engagement and Information Literacy" . Gibson, who is the associate university librarian for public services at George Mason University, says that, while portions of information-fluency-related assessments and pedagogies can be integrated throughout a student’s academic career, enhancing students’ information fluency skills is not purely an academic concern. Information fluency is a lifelong learning issue that starts in K-12, through higher education, and into the workplace and our personal lives.