¶ … Literacy in Education: Its Influence on Scholarship, Practice and Leadership
It was said of Thomas Jefferson that he knew almost everything there was to know. Life was simpler 250 years ago, and the world was smaller. There were only a fraction of the books that there are today, which was not a great problem since most people could not read. For today's learner, however, there is an infinite amount of information available from a wide array of resources and in many different formats. The challenge for students is to find the information they need and evaluate it critically. It is not a skill that students develop automatically through assignments and projects; they must be explicitly taught. The challenge lies, ultimately, with educators, who need to revise curricula and update practices to meet the needs of a new generation of students.
If schools are not always doing a good job teaching these new skills, it may be due to the fact that educators are not comfortable with them. "Students are currently operating in a radically different information universe from the one in which their faculty learned and practiced" (Grafstein, 2002, p. 199). It may also have something to do with the pressures educators feel to cover standards-based material that prepares students for high-stakes testing. It may seem that there is simply not time in the school day to devote much time to information literacy.
The term "information literacy" (IL) did not come into use until the mid-1970s (Grafstein, 2002, p. 197). Before that time, there was "bibliographic instruction," wherein librarians offered instruction in the use of traditional sources, mostly books, periodicals and high-tech (for its time) formats such as microfilm and microfiche. IL grew as the , gathering information is "as simple as picking low-hanging apples off a tree in an orchard without guard dogs" (Badke, 2009, p. 47). There is plenty of information on almost any topic one can imagine. It is too much information when one has not learned to be discerning.
Badke points out that the advent of the World Wide Web was relatively inauspicious. It was interesting, fun and novel, but no one could have predicted the tremendous, life-changing impact it would have on everything from personal communications to global business to education. In the late 1990s, "Google" was merely the name of a new search engine, one of dozens that early Web users employed to navigate the growing tide of information. Today, "google" is also a verb, and "googling" a word or phrase opens the gateway to an overwhelming amount of information. The problem is that most students do not know how to evaluate the credibility of Web sources and often give little thought even to the need to do so. There is an assumption that if it is on the Web, it must be true. For the newest generation of students, to which Badke refers as "Net-Geners," the Web has supplanted the library as…
Literacy & Its Influence on Business and Future Leaders The objective of this study is to explain how information literacy influences scholarship, practice, and leadership in a specific profession or discipline. For the purpose of this study, the legal profession will be chosen. Badke (2009) writes in the work entitled 'How We Failed the Net Generation' that the World Wide Web came upon most of us who encountered it in the
To adequately teach these skills requires little more than a commitment from the teacher or curriculum monitor. It is a matter of framing assignments in the appropriate manner -- instead of simply requiring a: Research Paper on an Aspect of Costa Rica, work in a preliminary annotated bibligoraphy section that requires the appropriate vetting and analysis of the sources; require several types of sources, and explain why. Above all,
Zabel (2004) proposes an alternative solution that does not involve mandatory courses or the separate academic focus on library science as a stand-alone course. Instead, Zabel suggests that academic research requirements in substantive courses be adapted as necessary to ensure an appropriate and beneficial process for teaching research skills and informational literacy but strictly within the framework of substantive courses. The author also points out that it is likely much
While Lauer and Yodanis (2008) point out that the weblog has many applications, such as a journal or other means or personal use, they state that it can be used as a tool for students to collaborate with each other and share their learning, in addition to a tool for research where students can record their notes, thoughts, and links to more source material. Furthermore, the authors suggest that
According to Stein, (as cited in Lauer & Yodanis, 2004), American students tend to be globally illiterate. A large amount of empirical research and anecdotal evidence from various perspectives documents, stresses the need to improve informational literacy throughout the American educational system (Schutt & Hightower, 2009; Zabel 2004). Without such improvement, education and knowledge will simply stagnate, and perhaps even regress. These authors do not agree on all of the
Literacy The simple discipline of study might seem to broad an area of focus when discussing information literacy, yet it actually provides an excellent avenue for examining how scholarship, practice, and leadership are influenced by the ability to locate and process information. There has unquestionably been a fundamental change in the way information is accessed and approached in modern society; computers and the Internet have now been ubiquitous parts of
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