Information Literacy in Education and Its Influence on the Scholarship Practice and Leadership

¶ … 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 numbers and types of resources grew. However, IL has continued to be a separate entity, the stepchild to academic disciplines instead of an integrated part. Learning in the K-12 environment can often be product-oriented rather than process-oriented. IL, as part of a process, has not been given sufficient attention.

University librarian William Badke says that for today's student, 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 an information source. Unlike a bricks-and-mortar library, there are no space constraints. The Web is "open" every hour or every day.

With smart phones and tablet devices, Web users are no longer even limited to their desktops. Wi-fi cafes abound, but even those are no longer essential with devices that offer 3G access. It is no wonder the library seems hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date. Educators can share some of the blame of the information literacy problem. Badke points out that educators have contributed valuable teaching resources to the Web (2009, p. 48). However, they have also demanded less of students, showing them the easy way to research using Google and sites like Wikipedia.

Children in the primary grades receive some "technology education," requiring them, for example, for find a picture on the Web and paste it into a report. When research is thus simplified, it is unreasonable to expect that students will come to college with the skills to find resources and evaluate them critically. According to university librarian Pia Russell, the problem extends beyond students' inabilities to conduct quality research and separate credible information from that which is not.

Citing research by Maryann Wolf, Director of the Centre for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, "screen-based information is coming to dominate the reading process" (Russell, 2009, p. 93), while internalization of knowledge, critical thinking, and meaningful inference are skills in decline. These skills are more necessary than ever, according to educational theorist Howard Gardner, who argues that the development of five conceptual constructs of the mind -- disciplines, synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical -- are needed to make sense of the modern world's information glut (Russel, p. 93).

Even twenty years ago, half of what students learned at university was considered outdated five years after graduated (Turusheva, 2009, p. 127). The world is changing even more rapidly now, making it more imperative than ever that education, including information literacy, should.