Wired magazine just reported on something that we librarians have known for quite some time. Though students look tech-savvy and think they're tech-savvy, the reality is that, for most of them, their tech-saviness is only surface-level. Students are rarely taught how to search or judge the credibility of what they find (it's not on the standardized test so who has time) and when they get to college, professors assume that they have that knowledge, but they don't.
In the end, it's of matter of learning to think critically. I'm concerned because I know there must be good teachers out there trying to tackle this topic, but as school librarians are cut as non-essential, and teachers lose more and more of their ability to teach what's not "on the test, " students aren't learning to be inquisitive and to question what they locate, to determine it's value and credibility, and to take whatever "comes up first" (and that would include library resources as well as Internet search results).
I just spent almost two hours working with at least four people that were so frustrated by this mismatch of their knowledge and assumptions of what there knowledge should be. It was frustrating for everyone, and it makes me question our ability to do this around at this late stage in the game, but if given the opportunities, I know we can help the students to understand. I just would like to get started on it earlier!
I'm going to figure out how to do that...someday!
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