Reading Report 11/3

Megan Beverly
Reading Report
11/3/09
"Information Navigation 101" by Andrea L. Foster.
Chronicle of Higher Education (3/9/2007).

As a college student, one uses technology all the time in everyday life. But, many college students do not know how to do academic research using scholarly sources. Many things have changed students today into people who rely on such sources as Google and Wikipedia, because of the ease a familiarity of these engines. But, it was not always this way, in the past you were almost forced to go to the library to find information. This was before the time of Google and other quick and easy search engines. There is so much information out there, that it is easy to get confused by what information to use, unless you have been formally taught how to do so.
There is a push to make the new generation more information savvy, in a movement called “information literacy”. This is an effort led by librarians to help students become more able to find and review the proper information without being so overly confused and overwhelmed. Now, business people and teachers are jumping on board with this “information literacy”, so that it will reach broader audiences. This program is now instituted at many campuses around the country, to teach students how to find, sort and analyze all the information they are bombarded with. Many campuses interpret information literacy on campus as many different things including research, plagiarism, and understanding things within the research such as footnotes. Some people are also against this movement, because it’s almost like more laws that one must follow, but others strongly oppose saying that it is necessary for this generation to learn this information literacy. There have also been tests developed to see how students do when accessing information, what level they are at, and what level they should be at. Many students were found to be unprepared for college, and these information literacy programs would greatly help them.
I think that as a college student, we do rely way too much on things like Google and Wikipedia. We need programs and classes, such as this one to help us learn the right way to access, interpret and use scholarly information. I think that many people are unprepared for the research that they will be required to do. Even just taking this library class and learning about ways to research has helped me greatly, too bad I took it my last semester it would have helped me in my academic career.