The importance of critical literacy

The lecture today actually got me pretty excited about teaching information literacy in the future....worrying I know! I definitely agree with the comments made about the importance of teaching, or at least modelling critical literacy to children as early as possible. We are bombarded by images and text in our everyday lives, which we as adults are constantly processing and filtering to be able to obtain useful information and discard not so useful information! We have learned and perfected this throughout our lifetimes but this is something we need to teach our students explicitly.
By explicitly teaching our students what questions to ask when they are exposed to new literacies, and the process of triangulation, they will be able to challenge and build on their current knowledge. Digital literacies offer the perfect opportunity to teach critical literacy. The amount of information out there is seemingly endless and without the tools of critical literacy (crap detection 101!) it would be virtually impossible to find and identify useful sources of information.