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

Reading Assignment "Infodiet"

This article was extremely interesting to me. It talks about how students have come to rely on Google for all of their research needs. It claims that students today have no idea how to use libraries or how to search library catalogs on a computer. Steven Bell, the author, refers to the information and search results found in Google as "junk food", while referring to the quality information found in libraries and their search catalogs as the "nutritious food". Bell says that in order to get students to begin to use search catalogs, they need to be made more similar to Google. The simplicity of Google is what students are attracted to and therefor if search catalogs were made just as easy to use they would appeal more to college students. The article tells us that James Morris, from Carnegie Mellon University, has made up the term "infobesity" which refers to the Google-ized information search which is made up of large amounts of low quality information. These links to low quality information cause students to write low quality research papers, but since Google is far easier to use students will be writing low quality papers until search catalogs are made to be the same.

I personally think the Steven Bell did a great job with this article. While reading this I felt like he was decribing me when he was talking about the stereotypical college student in today's world. Before i got to UNCW and started taking this course I had no idea that the information I was finding on Google was far inferior to that of the search catalogs available in the library. He is right though when he says students use Google because it is so much easier. Before this class I could not have even began to use a search catalog effectively enough to gather information for a research paper. It is much harder and more time consuming in comparison to typing a few keywords into the Google search engine.

-Kevin Petersen