On 14 May 2013 13:00, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
Part of the problem is that information literacy is really poorly taught IMHO.
It's often shuffled around universities: between academic staff, librarians and learning support people, and nobody actually takes the time to tell students what is and isn't acceptable. (And then those students start editing Wikipedia…)
I do wounder if the digital switchover has something to do with this.
I saw a first year student a while back who was citing a "crystal healing" website to define key terms in moral philosophy for the essay they had to do on computer ethics as part of a computer science degree at a top 10 UK department for computing. Nobody had actually taught them at school or upon getting to university that some sources were better than others, and that you might actually have to go to the library and open a book rather than just go to Google and find a source that says what you want it to say.
Getting into the dead tree sources of fields you don't know that much about is also problematical. In fairness chemistry doesn't really do books. Oh they exist but for any heavy work its all int the journals.
I know that when I got to university, they offered those kinds of skills as optional "study skills" modules, which lots of people just didn't bother going to - because they naturally assumed from having passed their A-levels with grades good enough to let them go to university that they didn't need to learn any new study skills. Making basic information literacy and study skills non-optional both at school and university would be good.
Hmm I suspect that's field specific (in fairness chemistry tends to have fewer optional modules).
It's not Wikipedia's job to make society actually teach information
literacy (although Wikimedians and WMUK might want to publicly advocate it). That's the job of schools and universities. It'd be nice to know in a non-anecdotal way whether they are actually trying to do this and how well they are doing.
Well the standard "use the sources at the end of the wikipedia article" suggests we may have a problem. While in some cases wikipedians do a reasonable job in selecting these in other cases they can often be whatever the wikipedian had to hand. For example I doubt that Our Changing Coast a survey of the intertidal archaeology of Langstone Harbour Hampshire is the best source in the world when it comes to Phoenix breakwaters.