On 14 May 2013 13:00, Tom Morris <tom(a)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.
--
geni