Abstract:
It is crucial for university students to become information literate in order to succeed
in their studies; even more so in the current social media environment. Educators need
to become part of this social world in order to ensure that their teaching stays relevant.
This article reports on a project undertaken at the University of Pretoria with the aim of
introducing social media to the campus-wide Information Literacy (IL) course offered.
A research project was launched in which the IL course was assessed and new ways of
presenting the current material were developed. This involved repackaging the course
content and developing a toolkit with built-in activities for students. Interactive class
exercises to ensure student engagement aimed at acquainting students with various social
media tools and encourage academic networking and cooperation were introduced. It is
believed that this new approach in presenting and teaching the IL course will not only
have long-term benefits for students in their on-going studies, but will impact on their
future work-lives as well.
