Monday 28 April 2008

Information Literacy

Lost in Ciberia….
Is the Google generation more information literate than previous generations? Not according to a recent report from the CIBER research unit at UCL, produced for the British Library and the JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (11 January 2008). It is perhaps ironic that the explosion of freely accessible information has gone hand in hand with clear evidence of an inability to find information, that we have become ‘information-rich but question-poor.’ This would seem counterintuitive, given the enormous success of search engines like Google, the utility of natural-language searching and the hype around the semantic web. But the CIBER report indicates a number of startling findings

The ‘net native’ generation they studied increasingly lack the linguistic, logical and critical-evaluation skills to find stuff. They have no conceptual framework of the digital-information landscape. In effect, the digital literacies of the Google Generation have not developed in parallel with information literacy. If anything, the digital environment has made it harder to evaluate stuff in terms of: authority, quality, accuracy; relevance, bias, currency. There are a number of reasons for this. Partly it’s about the rapid rate of change to a fully digital environment, partly because of the speed at which things are emerging, converging and hybridizing on the web. But the big problem is information overload. According to Peter Morville in his seminal book Ambient Findability, (2005) ‘There is so much to find, but we must first know how to search and who to trust. In the information age, transmedia information literacy is a core life skill’. The UNESCO Prague Declaration of 2003, Towards an Information Literate Society goes one further and frames the problem as one of rights: information literacy ‘is a prerequisite for participating effectively in the information society, and is part of the basic human right of lifelong learning.’ Fail to find stuff and you are marginalised and disenfranchised. Findability just got a whole lot more serious.

1 comment:

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