Reading Report #5

"Information Navigation 101"

Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education

3/9/2007, Vol. 53 Issue 27

This article discusses the disconnect between the way college students use technology to text, manipulate music files, and customize their MySpace pages, and the way they perform research. It seems that college students are sadly inept at performing academic research. Forster argues that the sheer volume of information is giving student’s an overload, and that they are unable to distinguish between scholarly sources and what is spit out to them by Google. In response, many universities are implementing “information literacy” programs and adding it to the required graduation curricula as accrediting agencies look to them as a new measure of an institution’s performance. These programs are being spearheaded by librarians and aim to teach students how to locate and evaluate data on the Internet. The article then discusses the history of the term and its development in the academic community. Foster also presents an alternate view that some librarians share – that information seeking is going to become easier over time, citing the almost obsolete Boolean qualifiers as an example. She goes on to describe some of the standardized tests that have been developed in order to measure students’ information literacy skills, and their relative effectiveness.

I think that Andrea Foster and other strong supporters of the information literacy movement don’t give students enough credit. I have previously thought that most students are in fact information literate, and any problems with their research practices stem from laziness rather than ignorance. If indeed that be the case, then I believe that providing greater motivation for the student to learn how to access scholarly information would be more beneficial. Perhaps my own case is singular, but when I given a research paper assignment by a professor that told me to find information through the library catalogue, I quickly learned how to navigate the catalogue and online databases. Like most technology, all it takes is the time to play around with the software. However, I do not think that the growing information literacy programs are a bad thing – they can only be beneficial. I am also intrigued by these standardized tests that Foster describes, in particular the EST one. I believe myself to be decently information literate, in whatever sense of the word one chooses, and I would be interested in the opportunity to test myself.