Information Navigation

This article again talks about a very important topic for our class: information literacy. Over the past decade the availability of information on the internet has exploded. This has caused students of this generation to be provided with a lot of information that can be easily accessed although it may not be very credible. The Internet has grown from 18,000 sites in 1995 to now over 100 million. This has broadened the search area greatly which makes it much harder for students to be sure which information is credible.
Many librarians though do not agree with each other on the ways in which information literacy is being taught. Some think that information literacy should almost be taught as a completely separate course while others disagree; saying that searching for information is becoming simpler by the day and that taking too much time to teach these skills would be a waste.
My opinion is that students do need to be taught the difference between what information is acceptable and what is not. The creation and expansion of Google has made it extremely easy for students to type in a few keywords and in less than a second be provided with thousands of related websites. While Google can be very helpful, it certainly is not the best option for student research but students have been turning to it because of its simplicity. I think that if students are taught how to use scholarly databases at an earlier point in the education process, it will be much easier for them to turn to them for research instead of using Google because using a scholarly database will not seem like as much of a chore as it does too many students now.

-Kevin Petersen