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

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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.

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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….....

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