Information Literacy

Running Head: INFORMATION LITERACY

Information Literacy

Richard N. Dettling

University of Phoenix

Information Literacy

Over the past two decades, higher education has experienced many changes in the method of providing literary information to its students. The traditional method of going to a local or university library to find scholarly information in journals, books, reviews, and professional publications has been replaced by the effortless method of finding this information online (Badke, 2009). This tectonic shift in the exposure to more information and the way it is gathered by students over the last 20 years consequently has allowed unscholarly material to creep its way into student's writing (Badke, 2009). This gradual advance and exposure of nonacademic research into student's writing has blurred the students' ability to recognize, evaluate, organize, and identify the best sources of information (Russell, 2009). Information illiterate students need to develop research techniques to locate the sources that will yield the best reliable information. Obtaining the skill and competency to retrieve and use reliable information will lead the student to be successful in school and his or her future profession (Owusu-Ansah, 2004; Russell, 2009). The focus on information literacy will begin with higher education and its influences on scholarship, practice, and leadership.

Influences on Scholarship

Information literacy is critically important to higher education because it is necessary to identify what is reliable from unreliable for use in scholarship. Students' engagement with scholarship focuses on existing research, a body of knowledge, and sharing those ideas within a specific discipline. Students entangled by the morass of Internet information are confused and troubled when they need to sift through this information to determine if the information is important or unimportant. Whether students on proprietary databases or the blogosphere obtain information, they unfortunately have difficulty determining the reliability of information from the various arrays of Internet sources. According to Badke (2009), retrieving reliable information is not a concern for students. "Surveys continually show that students either don't think about checking the reliability of web information or don't know how to evaluate websites, even if they do think about it" (Badke, 2009, p. 48). Not all Internet sources are discriminating. Some sources are authoritative, credible, relevant, timely, whereas others sources are biased, slanted, outright misleading, and false. For that reason, it is essential for all learners to have some advanced competency of searching through the numerous literary and media sources, technology skills, finding sources, evaluate them, analyze and present information to establish excellence in scholarly information (Turusheva, 2009). Students' successful involvement with scholarship requires competency and skill in retrieval, evaluation, and use of scholarly information.

Influences on Practice

Students struggle using information critically and effectively because they lack understanding what constitutes good scholarly information (Russell, 2009). The ability to find, evaluate, use, and share authoritative information is an essential competency important to higher education because the practice of this competency legitimizes research and validates the institution of higher learning (Turusheheva, 2009). While students use information literacy skills for research papers, reports, and group presentations and the practice of these skills also reach beyond their academic career into their professional careers (Owusu-Ansah, 2004). Developing student's information competence prepares students for active lifelong education (Turusheheva, 2009). Understanding what constitutes good scholarly information and the ability to find the information and using it is important to the student, institution of higher learning, and the student's future profession.

The focus on information literacy practices also needs to highlight the importance of using proprietary scholarly databases. Scholarly databases used primarily by universities can handle complex subject matter, they obtain their information from professional and subject matter experts, and they are organized to meet the challenges of student's needs. Unfortunately, scholarly databases are ignored despite the fact scholarly databases house the bulk of academic literature (Badke, 2009). The problem lies in the abundance of information on these databases, there are so many interfaces and search methods that students become confused and disorganized that they easily adopt intuitive sources like Google Scholar (Russell, 2009). In addition, according to Turusheheva (2009), when students compare the ease of use with Internet search engines to the more complex scholarly databases, students will avoid critical evaluation of the sources and often prefer the Internet information for its easier format and accessibility. Regrettably, these search engines are insufficient because the information they gather cast-a-wide-net and the results include self-published, unevaluated, unauthorized, and unreliable sources; even though "70% or 80% of all students in higher education seek out Google first for every kind of research" (Badke, 2009, p. 48). As a result, students are presumably writing papers with untrustworthy information and obtaining good grades for them (Badke, 2009). This does not bode well for any institution of higher education. Undecidedly, the future of higher education will need to change the practice of information literacy. Either higher education will need to change the way information is retrieved or change the way higher education prepares learners to gather information.

Influences on Leadership

Higher education requires a review of current and past preferences and practices toward information literacy (Owusu-Ansah, 2004). The leading role of higher education toward information literacy will need to focus on how to incorporate instruction in information competence throughout the curriculum and to add information competence as a graduation requirement for students (Owusu-Ansah, 2004). Higher education needs to take the lead on training and providing students with the skills and competencies to search, organize, and synthesize information clearly and effectively. This training program should not only be for learners but also for educators.. According to Turusheheva (2009), "Students informative competence is an integrated study program element, and they are helped to develop their information competence not only by the teaching staff, but by librarians, as well" (p. 130). There is disagreement regarding who should take charge of training students and educators. Owusu-Ansah (2004) concluded information literacy had to be taught cooperatively between librarians and faculty. However, Russell (2009) emphasized that librarians alone are uniquely situated as information experts. Unfortunately, higher education doubts their ability to achieve any far-reaching results and concede, "The lack of institutional, human, and monetary resources to proceed with any ambition programs" (Owusu-Ansah, 2004, p. 3). Whether faculty or librarians do the job of information literacy training or not, faculty will always continue to incorporate information literacy as part of their instructional materials (Owusu-Ansah, 2004). If higher education wants to take a successful leadership role, it must provide learners with the skills and competencies for information literacy

Conclusion

Over the past two decades there has been a shift in the way information is gathered, evaluated, organized, and synthesized by learners. The result of which has produced applications and search methods that create untrustworthy and unreliable information for uses in higher education. Unfortunately, the current intuitive search methods used by learners are ineffective for finding entirely reliable, evaluated, and authorized sources. Higher education must take the lead in training educators and students with information literacy skills and competencies to bridge the intuitive gap of searching for information on propriety scholarly databases.

References

Badke, W. (2009, July/August). How we failed the net generation. Online, 33(4), 47. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, COM705-Week 1 Electronic Reserved Readings

Owusu-Ansah, E. K. (2004). Information Literacy and Higher Education: Placing the Academic Library in the Center of a Comprehensive Solution. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(1), 3-16. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Russell, P. (2009). Why universities need information literacy now more than ever. Feliciter, 55(3), 92. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, COM705-Week 1 Electronic Reserved Readings

Turusheva, L. (2009). Students' information competence and its importance for life-long education. Problems of Education in the 21st Century, 12, 126. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, COM705-Week 1 Electronic Reserved Readings