Having explored in Chapter 5 the value of methodologies in the context of information literacy teaching, I should now like to turn my attention to the more specific matter of methods, with particular emphasis on the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘where’. In Chapter 2, I explained that many young people follow a simplistic formula when finding and using information. Chapter 6 has been written largely with a view to countering this mentality. Typically, the formula begins with students going at once to the World Wide Web when they are tackling any kind of assignment that requires them to work with information that is not already in their possession. A more sensible starting point lies in revisiting their information specification and asking themselves, from an openminded standpoint, where the best options would seem to lie in order to find material that is authoritative, of high quality and suitable for their purposes. Clearly, this demands some knowledge of, in broad terms, the forms of action that may be taken, the characteristics of the likely types of resources and the techniques that are best applied to access them.

The choices available

Students can be helped to appreciate the wide variety of the possibilities available for ‘finding out’ by considering the fundamental means of learning put forward by Gorman (1998, 96). In Figure 6.1 on the next page, these are framed in the context of a student undertaking an independent learning assignment. The three forms of learning identified by Gorman correspond closely to the information-seeking actions suggested by Barrass (1982, 94) and covered in the Introduction. Specifically:

• 1 First-hand experience can lead to the kind of ‘thinking’ that Barrass recognises.

• 2 With respect to the teachings of a more knowledgeable or experienced individual, contributions may be solicited from them via Barrass's methods of ‘talking’ and ‘writing’.

• 3 Accessing ‘manifestations of recorded knowledge’ can be roughly equated with Barrass's activity of ‘reading’.

As in Barrass's typology, the actions highlighted by Gorman involve both personally elicited data and information that resides in existing sources. In terms of the former, these may be collected via observations and experiments which the individual undertakes themselves (option one) and, if we broaden the people envisaged by Gorman to encompass anyone from whom we can learn, they may include, for example, research participants who are surveyed via questionnaires or interviewed either one-to-one or in a focus group.