Information literacy is something I take great interest in and it wasn’t until I came up north that I began to think of this type of literacy as having many tiers. For one thing, it never even occured to me that before one can become “information literate” one must be literate to begin with. Up north, poor reading comprehension is a major challenge for schools. This is due to a number of factors, of which common northern social problems and a high incidence of FAS/FAE play no small part. I came here imagining that I would be teaching students “the basics”: skills like evaluating information from websites and researching beyond Google’s first page. Now that I’m here, I find need to take a completely different approach: build basic reading skills with hi/lo materials, designing the library with new audio-visual stations, working with the students’ innate interest in the north and trying to foster greater engagement with their own cultural heritages and languages.

I never really considered how important things like culture, values etc. are to the digital divide. Some factors that are essential in examining the digital divide that I never considered before:

• cultural values supporting education and use of technology (not a priority in the north it seems to me)
• cultural values supporting civic engagement etc.
• basic literacy
• no-low censorship, laws protecting freedom of information
• laws and policies protecting user privacy
• well maintained public library infrastructure
• specialized hardware (e.g. aboriginal keyboards, aids for users with perceptual disabilities)
• access to conferences, barcamps, media based communities, etc.