Activity Theory in understanding Information Literacy as a Social Innovation

Abstract

Information literacy has gained relevance for being a fundamental pillar for lifelong learning, since it develops an understanding of the form, processes and cycle of production and critical use of different types of information. Information literacy is a meta-competence capable of helping the individual to deal with specific informational needs of each context and, because information literacy is considered essential for full human development, it can be considered as social innovation, since social innovation aims at social transformation by means of changes in social practices. This article is a literature review that attempted to elucidate how Engeström's Activity Theory is a potential theory to represent the underlying process of learning transfer that occurs in the processes of transformational information literacy in a context of social innovation, contrasting it with the situational perspective of information competence, in which learning is not automatically transferable from one context to another, but mediated by practice and limited to the situation, innovation can be stymied by the unidirectional learning movement that makes the learner experienced of a practice.