Unlearning the internet

Heather Moorcroft
NT University

Introduction

Young students are super internet users - do we still need Information literacy?

Young students mainly use the web for:

Social purposes - e-mail, chat
Entertainment - games, surfing the net looking up pictures of pop stars

Where they have used the web for study it has not been in-depth scholarly information

Finding information on search engines is easy - simply type in a phrase and you usually gets thousands of results. If you make a spelling mistake search engines like Google will prompt you with the correct spelling

Critical thinking skills

Grimes and Boening (2001) research:

Students use unauthenticated web resources; do not evaluate what they find - hence gap between what lecturers expect and what students deliver

Academic laziness

David Rothenberg (1998) - How the web destroys Student Research Papers: Decline in originality of thought.

Instant information

Librarian John Jaeger (2001) says students expect instant results and have no patience to search. He blames the web for this, But he also emphasizes the good aspects

My experience

Undergraduates only bother with full text, and only if it is easy to use

Role of librarians

To teach students about scholarly information and academic writing
To emphasize the problems of plagiarism

Internet is not all bad

Does have scholarly information
Some databases have non-academic information

Students need to learn to discriminate

Conclusion

Information literacy is therefore still essential

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