Lesson Objectives

• To consider ways to use your time while in high school to assure yourself an "information literate" future
• To look into what your future may offer in terms of work and education
• To get a sense of why and how you may publish your own documents on the World Wide Web
• To understand how you will remain "information literate" in a changing world with changing technology

The Lesson

The skills you have learned in the course on Information Literacy are skills that you will need and use long after you are graduated from high school. Every decision you make, from choosing a college, to choosing a career, from choosing a car, to choosing a mate, are all decisions requiring that you gather information and apply it. Researching information in a library, on the Internet, in any place you find yourself, will require that you begin with questions that focus your interest, know where to look for the answers, know how to operate the mechanics of retrieving information, be able to evaluate the value of what you discover and ultimately apply what you have found to good decision making and your own creative productions.

Your skills as an information literate person will take you well-beyond hurrying to the library with a class assignment and writing a research paper that only your teacher will read. As an information literate person, you are prepared to find information anywhere and you are prepared to deliver the information to the world. Your pool of resources has widened; your audience is ever expanding.

Making High School Count

The time you spend in high school can be an opportunity for you to have some of experiences that may grow to be a regular part of your adult life and to participate more and more in activities that many adults participate in every day. The information world provides many opportunities for learning and growing, so that before you finish your senior year of high school, you can get a head start on the next stage of your life.

There are many ways that you can use your high school years as a time to develop your information literacy skills while simultaneously developing your other skills, assets and talents. The lesson on educational resources on the Internet led you to Web sites that support your academic and school-related, extra-curricular studies. Consider some other ways that you can use your time, developing as a person while fine-tuning your thinking and communicating skills.

Why not study or live abroad?

Have you considered the possibility of studying, working or living abroad? Living, working and attending school in a different country gives you a chance to develop your skills in using a foreign language, gives you the opportunity to learn about another culture, lets you meet new friends from another place and may let you make a difference in people's lives.

Or, perhaps, your family in the United States can host students from another country. Imagine a teenager from Italy or Japan living in your home, attending your school with you each day, meeting your friends and improving his or her English every day.

Latitutes International (www.latitudesinternational.com) is a Web site worth visiting if you think you would like to work in the Caribbean one summer before you graduate from high school.

Now, find out, on your own, about opportunities for participating in international study. Put your information literacy skills to work:

Use the Web to hunt down a student exchange program! Tell your teacher what you have found.

I found a list of Web sites for exchange study programs using the directory Web site . . .

I clicked on the following links in the directory . . .

and I found a list of lots of sites. "How many?," you may ask. I found . . .

I tried out a few of the links. The linked site on the list I found particularly interesting was . . .

I liked what I saw at that site. The site included . . .

Exercise: Study Abroad!

Even if you never study abroad or invite a foreign student to live with you while you are in high school, you may consider getting involved in an online activity with other high school students from around the world by visiting the Web site for the International Education and Resource Network (www.igc.org/iearn). Choose a project that interests you and make a difference in somebody's life. The Information Literacy Course has put you in touch with other students in high schools in your area; IEARN will put you in touch with students in other countries.

That Trip Was Fun! Where Do I Go Next?

Living abroad for a few months or even a year while you are in high school and communicating with high schoolers from around the world may whet your appetite for spending time away from your home country when you become an adult. You might consider working for an organization that will station you far away from the United States and give you a chance to work among people in some ways very different from those who are your neighbors now, but in other ways who are very similar to people you already know.

Investigate war

[army | navy | air force | marines]

and peace

Be sure to read the peace corps volunteer essays. Here is an excerpt from an essay Donna Gessell wrote, Living By the Book, about her experience living and working as a volunteer on the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific:

Exercise: Choose a Book to Bring Along.

Volunteer: Give Something of Yourself and Get Something Priceless in Return

Working for the Peace Corps or joining one of the military services might be an interesting way for you to travel to a distant place when you get a little older. Volunteering for the Peace Corps, moreover, may pay very little, but is a way to help people less fortunate than you.

Opportunities to help the needy are not open only to adults, moreover. As a high school student, you can become connected with many charitable organizations that value the time you give. Visit any of the sites below to connect to a group that interests you. Volunteering provides the opportunity to serve others while developing your own skills and building your resume. Volunteering and helping others will make you feel good, too! As a volunteer you can do many kinds of things, some that can be done from your own home and others that require your hands-on assistance. When you work as a volunteer, you'll meet others who care about the same issues as you and you may even make new friends through your work.

Exercise: Volunteer Some Information.

Prepare for College While in High School

One very useful way to spend your time in high school is to begin investigating colleges. You can visit college web sites online through any one of these directories sites:

• College and University Web Pages
  www.mit.edu:8001/people/cdemello/univ.html
  
• College-bound Net
  www.cbnet.com
  
• CollegeEdge
  www.CollegeEdge.com
  
• CollegeView
  www.collegeview.com
  
• Petersons
  www.petersons.com
  

Exercise: Choose a Major.

You might also want to check out these Web sites that will help you find summer programs at colleges designed to give high school students a taste of what college is like:

• American Collegiate Adventures
  www.campchannel.com/adventures
  
• Explore Senior Program
  explo.org/senior.html
  
• Harvard Summer School's Secondary School Program
  ssp.dce.harvard.edu
  
• National Student Leadership Conference
  www.NSLCinfo.org
  
• Peterson's Summer Programs
  www.petersons.com/summerop/ssector.html
  

Exercise: Choose a Summer College Program.

Off to Work You Go

Whether or not your next step out of high school is college, work is in your future. Many Web sites will help you plan for the right career for you. Look into some of these:

• The Career Key
  www2.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/l/lkj/
  Online quizzes to determine the career most suited to your interests, abilities and values.

• Internet University Careers: Where to Go to Make Your Dough
  www.internetuniv.com/career/
  Figure out that right job for you or find the place you would like to live and a job to go with it!
  
• Kids & Jobs
  www.pbs.org/jobs/
  Designed for teens. Especially of interest is Cool Careers, your chance to talk online to someone with an exciting job.
  
• Hoovers Online
  www.hoovers.com
  Learn something about the major employers.
• JobSmart Home
  jobsmart.org/index.htm
  Focuses on California but includes some useful tips on Salary and the Hidden Job Market.
  
• My Future
  www.myfuture.com
  A cool looking site that gets you thinking about finance and career planning.
  
• Occupational Outlook Handbook
  stats.bls.gov:80/ocohome.htm
  The standard reference tool describing jobs responsibilities, salaries and prospects.
  

Visit The Career Key, take the quiz and find the career that suits you best!

Take Your Place on the Web: Become an Information Provider

You have been spending a lot of time during the past few weeks traveling through the World Wide Web for useful information as you plan your day or plan your career. Even as you have been traveling, you may have begun to think about how the same technology you are using to do research might assist you in presenting information that you would like to share with others.

One of the things that make the technology that powers information delivery so exciting today is that the technology is now in the hands of many, from young school children to the elderly, from the working class to business executives, from the rural farmer to the city apartment dweller. People in Boston, Massachusetts are online, but so are people in Bogota, Columbia. There is an Internet connection in Antarctica as well as in the Himalayas.

Everyone, everywhere, seems to have taken a step onto the stage offered by the World Wide Web. Many Web sites you visit may surprise you with their origins; some of the best research sites are often people's personal home pages. Internet access gives people more than a just a view of what other people have published. Internet access is allowing the average person to publish his or her own information on the World Wide Web.

It is likely that you will have an opportunity to learn how to write a home page for publication on the World Wide Web. Suddenly technology will allow you to design, write and publish a document so that many can read and see what you have to say. You will no longer be only writing for your teacher. You will be writing for the world. Take advantage of the opportunity. Be respectful of others when you present your piece, but don't be shy about stepping out online. The Internet may very well be the world's greatest democratic forum. You have a voice that can be heard.

Look into a few Web sites that can help you with designing a Web page. They can supplement what you learn with a teacher or the tutorial sites may be all you need to pick up the new skill.

"Nothing Endures But Change" - Heraclitus

It is said that the average adult American will have a number of different careers in his or her life time. Plan in high school for the career you want as an adult, work towards your goal in college and begin in your field when you are graduated. It sounds like a reasonable sequence of events and one you are very likely to follow. However, if you are like many other people, ten years down the road from now you may find yourself working in a field you never even considered or one that may not even exist now. Your grandparents never dreamed of becoming computer programmers. How many people, three generations ago, studied genetic engineering?

Just as people's interests and careers change, so, too, does the machinery that enables you to become information literate. Electronic devices grow smaller and faster. The computer you are working with now is more powerful than a computer that occupied an entire room twenty years ago. Desktop computers have shrunk down to laptops and laptops have evolved into computers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand.

Electronic devices increase in their functionality and begin to work with other electronic devices. The telephone, that once required a human operator to connect you to another party, now automatically allows you to talk to two people at once, put a friend on hold while you take a second call, identify a caller for you before you pick up the phone, and, of course, send out faxes and bring data to your computer.

Engineers observe the way people use electronic devices and strive to develop tools that are simpler and simpler to operate. When you use an automatic teller machine (ATM) at your bank, you may be able to issue your requests by touching options on the screen of the machine. More and more software packages are being equiped with voice recognition abilities, so that instead of typing in or pointing and clicking on your commands, you can tell your computer what it is you would like to do and your computer will then perform the requested function.

Behind the scenes, in the heart of your computer, operating systems are changing to help your computer function better and to allow you to get more work done with fewer steps. Using a computer has evolved in a way similar to the way cars evolved once automatic transmission came along. The machine itself begins to recognize when it must perform certain functions; the driver no longer needs to initiate every change.

Changes in the capabilities of and ways in which you use electronic devices, particularly those important for information retrieval, are happening everyday. The one most important piece of knowledge that you take with you from this course in Information Literacy should be an awareness that the way you do things now, the tools you use, the methods you use for operating these tools, are all very likely to change. In fact, every tool you use and every technique you learn for using each tool is very likely to change many times in the future. Furthermore, you are not likely to ever master each new tool that evolves for information gathering and dissemination. Fortunately, though, many information retrieval and processing tools will share common capabilities, or be designed to help people reach commonly desired goals.

The skill you need to master, rather than the knowledge of the extensive list of "how-to's" that come with whatever is the popular information tool of the day, is the ability to recognize what are the limits of the tools you use in your quest for finding information. Being information literate in an electronic environment, after all, is not very different from what it means to be literate in a non-electronic world. Being literate means that you can operate the tools of information delivery. More importantly, however, being literate means knowing how to select the tool that best suits your knowledge needs. Synthesize your thoughts, ask your questions, find the right tool that will lead you to your answers, apply the tool, elicit the answers, apply your new knowledge, create your own thesis. Information Literacy is an ongoing process. If you are willing to remain engaged in this process, you will remain information literate.