Information literacy influences on scholarship practice and leadership

¶ … 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 everyday life for at least a generation, and today's college students have had very little if any schooling where Google was not a part -- if not the only part -- of the research conducted (Russell 2009). While these innovations have made information infinitely more accessible, this has not necessarily been an advantage in all respects, as current research shows.

Scholarship is the primary activity of the academic world, and it has suffered greatly under the burden of the abundant information -- and misinformation -- provided by the Internet and the World Wide Web. As several authors have noted, students have become so used to making do with the "low-hanging apples" available on the Internet, such that more traditional and more reliable resources such as those found in increasingly foreign places like libraries go increasingly unnoticed and unutilized (Badke 2009; Eisenberg et al. 2005). Scholarship, in other words, has largely become a matter of typing a word in a search box and looking at the top ten results. With true information literacy, the accessibility provided by the World Wide Web makes it the most powerful tool for scholarship in human history many times over; without such literacy, it is a quagmire that bogs down efforts at scholarship.

It has long been observed that information and knowledge obtained at a university is old within five years (Turusheva & Turusheva 2006). The very practice of learning is itself being eroded by the ease of obtaining certain basic information on the Internet, meaning that certain skills at once assumed to be implicitly and inherently taught as a part of the educational process must now be communicated in a far more explicit and direct manner (Badke 2009; Turusheva & Turusheva 2006). This is precisely where information literacy enters -- or fails to enter -- into the set of components and factors that determine the efficacy of education and learning. These are the skills that are inherent parts of finding reliable and useful information in sources like books -- and before books themselves are found, in library systems that catalog these books -- and now these skills are no longer being learned in an implicit manner as research in elementary and secondary education does not really require library and book searches (Turusheva & Turusheva 2006; Russell 2009).