What Do Students Know? How Can We Teach Them?

College students are often portrayed as unsuspecting simpletons who are completely unaware of any type of information sources besides Google or Yahoo and are easily duped by the most obviously fraudulent web pages….An alternate explanation for why students use information from the free Web in their papers is not that they are so easily deceived but that they do not want to do any more work than necessary.–Meola, p.334.

How can we get students to use the web effectively? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could just give students a checklist of items that make a web site reliable and relevant for academic work? That is, in fact, what librarians have tried to do for about 5 years with no success. Checklists examining the authority, purpose, and accuracy of web sites have been recursive exercises. Checklists ask students to evaluate the authority and accuracy of a site when they have no starting place or point of comparison.

Web sites, like all information, are contextual. Unfortunately, anyone can put up a web site. Web sites are not vetted through the usual academic processes such as a book which is selected by a librarian, or through the peer review process for journal articles. Instead, there is a great amalgamation of information out there unorganized, and out of context.

The purpose of these assignments is to give students the tools to put web sites in context. To some degree, there are no “bad” web sites. Normally we would say is that a Holocaust denial site is inaccurate and not acceptable for academic work. However, a student writing a paper on the way the Holocaust is taught in Germany today, might cite pages to give context to the current ideas circulating. We need to show students how to frame what they read on the Internet and to compare this information to scholarly sources.

Finally, the way we approach discussing the Internet with students is essential. We all have had the experience of a niece or nephew fix our computers to know that there are generational differences to the way we perceive the Internet. Manuel (2002) notes that,

lecturing upon the drawbacks of the Internet was especially inappropriate for these students. They interpreted the words of caution about the Internet as ‘trashing’ of technology whose limitations they had not yet personally experienced by someone professionally threatened by the Internet. –p.1999.

Fortunately, this generation of students is also experimental. They grew up playing video games, playing with their cell phones and learn through experience. Abram & Luther (2004) suggests that “searching will more closely resemble exploration, navigation, and discovery” (n.p.). This gives us the opportunity to give students tools to find web sites suitable for academic work on their own terms.

 

References

• Abram, S. & Luther, J. (2004). Born with the chip. Library Journal 129 (8), 34-38. Retrieved 19 April 2005 from EbscoHost Academic Search Premier
• Manuel, K. (2002). Teaching information literacy to Generation Y. Journal of Library Administration 36 (1/2), 195-217.
• Meola, M. (2004). Chucking the checklist: a contextual approach to teaching undergraduates web-site evaluation. portal 4(3), 331-344.