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In an April 2018 webinar, the Freedom to Read Foundation asked the question: Do information consumers have the right to be misinformed? Fake news is nuanced, prolific, sometimes malicious, often automated, and has the added complications of emotion, privacy, and ethics. And unfortunately, fake news and its foundational components of misinformation and disinformation (mis/dis), aren’t quickly fixed by learning a few information literacy strategies or media literacy concepts. People are inclined to believe what they want to believe despite training, awareness of critical thinking, and acknowledgement of widely held “objective facts.” Are they less intelligent or information poor because they choose to exist in their own information worlds and privilege their own confirmation biases?

Individuals have the right to seek, avoid, and use information for themselves as they see fit, regardless of whether or not others deem their information deficient, insufficient, or even false. However, this is a very black and white perspective on a much more complex and nuanced moral issue. Even if it is to their detriment, people ultimately do have the right to be misinformed, choosing the information they will and won’t accept. But information professionals should still be compelled to instruct patrons on the importance of seeking, finding, and using quality information and sources.

The current environment of misinformation is causing expensive and negative consequences for society. Fake news is affecting democracy and its foundations, as well as newspapers and media companies that aim to combat this “pandemic.” In order to effectively provide accurate information, these companies are in need of a workforce with specific attitudes, skills, and knowledge (ASK). However, several studies show that students either do not have those ASK or have poorly developed them, indicating the need for better media literacy skills. Given that such skills are often not taught in school, nor is there a way for students to efficiently obtain them and tangibly show them to future employers, we propose a model ¹ that enhances the way students learn and how we measure such learning. Journalism students – enrolled in liberal arts, general studies, and humanities – have the potential to be upskilled and become the new critical thinking and fact-checking force needed to neutralize misinformation and foster a healthy society. Our model applies learning science and behavioral research on feedback and intrinsic motivation to foster students' ASK through a digital apprenticeship model that uses structured activities together with mentorship and feedback. Students participate in the creation of digital products for the journalism and news media industry. This prepares them for the types of tasks they will be required to perform in the job market. The digital apprenticeship matches students with the proper mentor, peer, and professional network. Students' work is compared against professional news media production to generate feedback, improve quality, and track progress. During the digital apprenticeship, students receive the ASK-SkillsCredit, a digital badge, which serves as a “nutritional” fact label that displays how students created the media content, the level of efficacy of the apprenticeship, and the standard of journalism quality of the piece. Lastly, we propose to enhance existing learning management systems to capture and promote a learner's profile data and expose aligned opportunities in news media outlets.

Public library workers (PLW) in the United States can use critical information literacy pedagogy (CILP) as a framework for working with people who are incarcerated to combat oppression. PLW who teach information literacy in any capacity in carceral settings should honor their involvement in pedagogy and follow Paulo Freire’s pedagogical philosophy by rejecting humanitarian postures in favor of humanistic approaches. This can be accomplished by aiming to have both PLW and people who are incarcerated reach an awareness of and critique multiple information literacies, and for PLW to situate themselves alongside, not above, people in jails and prisons in an effort to authentically empower the incarcerated to re-enter society. This practice promotes social justice because it challenges the idea that information literacies associated with dominant groups – and thus, groups who are in power themselves – are intrinsically more valuable than information literacies engaged in by groups that are systematically disempowered. The chapter will end with prospective examples of PLW who participate in CILP in carceral settings.

Technology is integral to contemporary life; where the digital transformation to virtual information accessibility impacts instruction, it alters the skills of learning and comprehension (Gonzalez-Patino & Esteban-Guitart, 2014; Lloyd, 2010). Although librarians/media specialists provide orientation, instruction, and research methods face-to-face and electronically, they recognize that digital learning instruction is not a linear process, and digital literacy (DL) is multi-disciplinary (Belshaw, 2012). Policy and public research findings indicate that higher education must be prepared to adapt to rapid changes in digital technology (Maybee, Bruce, Lupton, & Rebmann, 2017). Digital learning undergoes frequent transformations, with new disruptive innovation and research attempts at redefinition (Palfrey, 2015). Research often overlooks junior/community colleges. We are all learners and we need to understand the digital learning challenges that incorporating DL includes in the new digital ecology (Adams Becker et al., 2017). This study provides real faculty/librarian commentaries regarding the understanding needed to develop digital learning and contemporary digital library resources. The authors investigate faculties’ and librarians’ degree of DL perceptions with instruction at junior/community colleges. Survey data analysis uses the mean of digital self-efficacy of variables collected, revealing that participants surpassed Rogers’s (2003) chasm of 20% inclusion. Findings provided data to develop the Dimensions of Digital Learning rubric, a new evaluation tool that encourages faculty DL cross-training, librarians’ digital learning collaboration, and effective digital learning spaces.

This conceptual chapter sets the stage for how librarians can support informed learning. It looks at how the intersections between informed learning, Bakhtin’s philosophy of communication, and relational leadership contribute to a model of relational liaising. This chapter provides examples of practical applications, interdisciplinary collaboration, and shared leadership which librarians and other teachers can adapt for specific arts, humanities, or social sciences disciplines. Many of the illustrations are set within communication-related curricula but also include the arts.

Purpose and Methodology – Championing a shared vision and strategy for informed learning (INFL) as an approach to information literacy (IL) education (ILE) centers on establishing a common understanding of IL/INFL that is sensitive to the variation in the ways stakeholders perceive their information context and conceptualize IL. Accordingly, the purpose of this chapter is to examine findings from a recent phenomenographic study of conceptions of IL that captures the understanding of IL held across multiple stakeholder groups in an international school community (Cunningham, 2017) and to use these findings to revisit Bruce’s (2008) RACER framework as a compass to champion INFL throughout an organization.

Findings and Originality – The phenomenographic study found that stakeholders did not hold one singular conception of IL but rather they shared a series of conceptions of IL to varying degrees, and that the variation in the ways IL was conceptualized prevailed across three continuums namely the individual-collective, affective-cognitive, and competency–personal mastery continuums. Furthermore, the comparative analysis of the series of conceptions of IL created the opportunity to develop a model of the common ground of conceptual understanding of IL thereby making an original contribution to knowledge. By undertaking a comparative analysis of this common ground model of IL with Bruce’s conceptions of IL/INFL and RACER framework for championing IL, the outcome is to present a new IL “without borders” model offering a blended strategic approach to advancing INFL/ILE based on a more representative understanding of the ways stakeholder groups perceive their information context and conceptualize IL.