Every year, the St. Paul Saints minor league baseball team has a contest to name the pig who serves as one of its mascots for the summer. The chosen name usually is a product of popular culture – Stephen Colboar, Brat Favre, and last year’s tribute to Prince, Little Red Porkette.

What does this have to do with digital inclusion? Well, this year’s mascot is named Alternative Fats, demonstrating that the veracity of information is a popular and timely topic as well as an important one.

The Northstar Digital Literacy Assessment recently added an information literacy module to its suite of assessments. The module covers these broad topics:

  • Recognizing the need for information – articulating the question or issue at hand, and thinking about how information will move the conversation or activity forward
  • Identifying necessary information – thinking about what needs to be learned to further understanding
  • Finding information – using a good variety of sources, and refining questions as more is learned
  • Evaluating information – detecting bias, and determining reliability
  • Organizing information – making information accessible and usable
  • Using information – taking what’s been learned back to the original question or issue; knowing when additional information is necessary

By adding the module, Northstar is showing the importance of information literacy to an individual’s education, career and civic aspirations as well as to a person’s daily life as a consumer of information.