TOWARDS CUSTOMISING A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR APPLYING ETHICAL PRINCIPLES TO INFORMATION LITERACY

Literacy is widely recognised as a fundamental human right, which empowers individuals and opens opportunities for social, economic and political integration. Information Literacy can be defined as knowing when and why one might need information, where to find it, and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner. Although it is recognised that Information Accessibility and Information Literacy can help disadvantaged groups in both the developed and developing worlds improve their opportunities for developing their intellectual potential, there are a number of ethical issues that are invoked in the ownership, dissemination and utilisation of information using Information Technologies.

Traditional moral and ethical concepts can help flag issues such as digital exclusion; verification and reliability of information; intellectual property rights and fraud, theft, deceit and plagiarism; tracking and recording of Internet information usage; and the digital divide. In the instruction of Information Literacy to trainees and students it is important that both learners and teachers are aware of normative ethical principles that they can use in order to better understand the social, legal and ethical issues concerning Information Literacy and become more responsible information professionals and citizens in general.

In this paper we customise the theoretical framework developed by the US Content Subcommittee of the ImpactCS Steering Committee, which specifies ethical principles to cater for the teaching and learning of Information Literacy. A rational appeal can be made to these defensible ethical principles in order to arrive at judicious and morally justifiable judgements concerning Information Accessibility and Literacy. A normative claim can only be substantiated, a rational discourse presented, through an appeal to such principles, as presented in the Customised Theoretical Framework presented in this paper.