Reading #5

Reading #5
“Information Navigation 101”
Andrea Foster

The “Information Navigation Article” is about the history of information literacy. The term “information literate” was coined by Paul Zurkowski. This was in the 70’s before universities and such even thought about this topic! It was not until about 15 years later when the term “information literate” became a well know subject across the country. Information literacy is not just about knowing how to browse the Internet, but more specifically how to maneuver your way through and find useful information and analyze websites for precise information. The cult following section of this article discusses the ways their fellow colleagues in the library are responding to this “information literacy” topic. Some say they are treating it like criminal code, while a dean of libraries at a university is pretty much saying it’s not as important as people are making it out to be because finding information is become easier. Even with the skeptics, professors are going to the libraries more to get help for their students because more and more are becoming reliant on everyday search engines or some are in a situation where they are the first ones from their families to go to college. They usually have not had the exposure to finding proper information prior to arriving at a college. Some schools are requiring students to now take an information literacy test to determine their literacy levels! I believe this is an eye opening article because even though “information literacy” has been around for a long time, the term is rather new. With more and more school officials realizing that being “information literate” is important to a students learning, I think it is great to see universities take the initiative to promote programs to help students be able to really learn how to do research. However, I think they should start this earlier in a student’s career like their freshman year in high school! After all, the earlier this is imprinted in their brain, the more they realize it’s actually easier to find “scholarly info” in a database then searching some website. Like the saying goes, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks!” So, hopefully this “information literacy” effect will start to trickle down to younger generations of students!