INFORMATION LITERACY: FROM THE PRINT TO THE DIGITAL FORMAT

This research was about the identification of information competencies developed by university students during the transition from print to digital format, and its relationship with disciplinary training. This kind of competencies forms the basis for lifelong learning, and it enables people to assume control over their learning experiences.

Research in this field helps too to identify some of the factors that could be affecting today not only higher but also college education related with the development of those basic skills demanded by the information society. This subject brings relevant reflections to feedback the discussion about the skills needed in the context of the information society to access and remain in the educational system and to start to be part of the work force today.

Even though many efforts have been made in educational contexts in different countries in order to overcome the digital divide, some analysts note with concern the emphasis that has been made in the use of technologies and skills purely instrumental setting aside the development of skills essential to access, evaluate, process and communicate information, and the scare recognition of the role of social and cultural factors that might be affecting the development of such skills; research in this area has begun to highlight as relevant this subject.

Taking into account the above, educational system have to intervene in order to bridge the gap between teachers and students, and to generate relevant answers to handle the changes in the teaching and learning scenarios, which already have been affected by the possibilities that the information society offers to access multiple sources of information in new formats. This reality has impacted the academic spaces where information is a fundamental tool of the educational process.
This research is about the identification of the information competencies developed by university students during the transition from print to digital format, and its relationship with disciplinary training. The phenomenographic study was implemented with 120 students enrolled in three programs: psychology, information science and education; they were taking seventh semester. There was designed a test integrated by one self-observation test, and one experience of information research.

The instrument designed to characterize the information literacy was structured based on the theoretical perspective of Marciales, González, Castañeda-Peña y Barbosa and Barbosa Herrera, Marciales, and Castañeda-Peña. This perspective integrated the hierarchical relationship established by Greimas and Alvarado, between the information literacy and the performance, where the first is conceived as a category of higher-order and it refers to the existence of a virtual instance that produces the performance, so that the performance is not the information literacy but it is its expression.

Results suggest that university students experience slight change in their information literacy along their university students, and that there are not significant differences between those competencies used in different formats: print or digital.