Information Literacy: is the ability to search, find, identify, classify, corroborate, retrieve, evaluate, simply, and use the information that is appropriate and necessary to a specific need. In our work, college and the day a day, we need to use old or new information for any requirement or problem. Nowadays, with the relatively easy availability of information, it is essential the development and application of this skill.

We can develop an example of information literacy skills based on some paragraphs of the text "Deconstructing Digital Comfortableness" of our course. In this text we can read "Oblinger (2004) reports that 84% of college students report owning their own computer as evidence of the ubiquity of access to leading edge technology and comfort with it. Evans (2006) predicts that this number will increase to 96% by 2012."

These sentences were written with the objective of supporting the thesis statement of the author, but they are ambiguous, uncertain and false just as they were taken of the original paper. Unaware readers fall in this data believing that the author's thoughts are certain.

The author quotes the reference to discharge responsibilities, but only he takes very oriented sentences that they are absolutely imprecise. Does the 84% refer to the college students of which region, city, community, country? Or maybe he is talking all colleges around the world. Does the 96% refer to the same context, or the world?

With this partial information, the author stresses what he wants to stress for supporting his theory; but if we only see at UNICEF web site (http://www.unicef.org/sowc09/docs/SOWC09-all-tables.xls, tables 5 to 8; acceded on Friday, October 9, 2009) we can infer that this data correspond to a very particular sample (community, region or school). Finally, if the author reaches some conclusion, they only could be applied for this particular sample.

This is an example of how we can apply our Information Literacy in the way that is cited in the reference “Digital, Highly Connected Children: Implications for education”: Trust nobody.

 

Quality Assurance Literacy: is the ability and skill to work and produce elements that they conserve a certain minimum level of quality. There are not standards of quality in creative works; then, the development of these skills is essential.

As example, the text "Digital, Highly Connected Children: Implications for education", in its seventh literacy description, Quality Assurance Literacy, states: "We need to develop new standards for evaluating the excellence of the digital creations"

Later, the author of the article appears to fail in its own advice when he creates a table. The table presenting the percentage of Kids as Webmasters says that between Ages 6-17 represents a 10% and Ages between 6-8 plus 9-12 represent the 13%; so, the second group (Ages 6-8 plus 9-12) is a part of the first group, but it contain a higher percentage. As conclusion, the information is presented in an incorrect way or the table has some mistakes.

Other questions about quality of these data arise easily. Are 6 years old kids able to develop or decide a web site when they are learning to read and write? Which community represent this table? We saw for UNICEF statistics that this table does not apply for most of the children around the world. Finally, has this table the enough quality as source of information?