How Post-Graduate Information Science Students Design Information Resources? Multimodal Information Literacy Perspectives

Information literacy have been conceptualized by numerous researchers and organizations for a long time. Especially after the prevalence of ICT and screen-based digital communication tools which make a constant connection among people, information literacy has recently been re-conceptualized regarding the new culture, user agency, and text structure. Under these conditions, individuals are seen to make meaning of existing information resources and create new information resources as the parts of socialized information construction processes. Therefore, individuals are considered active designers of information resources. In this respect, this study aims to explore how individuals design information resources which are expected to have multimodal semiotic text structure. A qualitative descriptive method was adopted, and data was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. 16 post-graduate Department of Information and Records Management students joined the study. 64 information resources (participant-generated texts) were analyzed. Results demonstrate that the semiotic structure of information resources is far from having high meaning-making potential and mostly dominantly monomodal instead of being multimodal. The study recommends that information literacy education should also focus on how to design semiotic rich and multimodal information resources to be effective contributors to information construction.