‘Face-a-book’ challenge for KV students

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Facebook-bitten Gen X has been posed a challenge: ‘face-a-book.’ The book is real and not fake, like many of the profiles in the social networking sites. The idea is to bring kids back to libraries and books and, in short, to the information source.
 It is the Kendriya Vidyalaya, Pattom, that has come up with the innovative concept as part of its infolit India project (http://infolitindia.org/) which is a pilot project on information literacy for new generation learners to enable them to make effective use of information available to them.
 ‘’It is an effort to make students return to books and libraries to learn how to effectively use them for sourcing information. It is to teach the students to compare the various media before them, from newspapers and channels to internet and be sensible enough to develop mastery over them. The aim is to develop skills in information, media and library, which have been named the 21st century literacy skills,’’ said S L Faisal, librarian at KV Pattom, who is also a member of the Library Evaluation Committee instituted by KV Sangathan.
 Under the project, a basic curriculum for information literacy would be developed by KV Pattom which would be tried out in 50 to 100 students from class 1 to 12.
 This would be done for the next one year, for which various competitions would also be held. Face-a-book is one main component of the infolit programme, through which students would be made aware of the resources and services available in the library. ‘’It is also to develop reading habit among a generation which is glued to computers and in front of social networking sites that the project is aimed at,’’ Faisal said.
 The UNESCO has been focusing on media and information literacy with the intention of ‘’providing people with skills and abilities for critical reception, assessment and use of information and media in their professional and personal lives,’’ courtesy the UNESCO website (UNESCO Information Literacy portal). It is toeing the line of the UNESCO concept that the KV Pattom has initiated the programme, which is claimed to be the first in the country.