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In the academic imagination, depth and attention are the highest of virtues. But in pushing students to apply high-attention strategies to all incoming information, we risk creating a new and dangerous shallowness.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Chris Thorpe (City, University of London, UK) and I presented on the first day of the virtual European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL2021) on Fake news: has it changed UK academic librarians’ ideas about teaching Information Literacy?  The slides are embedded below.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

As “research it yourself” becomes a rallying cry for promoters of outlandish conspiracy theories with real-world consequences, educators need to think hard about what’s missing from their information literacy efforts.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

Google announced today the gradual release of a new search feature which will help users get more reliable results. Search results in Google will now start showing an icon which when you click on it will display more information about the source site without having to actually visit it. 

Via Elizabeth E Charles

In this blog post, Alison Hicks, the CILIP Information Literacy Group rep for Higher Education and LIS, talks about an article she inadvertently found that she related to both personally and professionally and her thoughts on how diverse learners are represented within models of information literacy.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

For almost 20 years, instruction librarians have relied on variations of two models, the CRAAP Test and SIFT, to teach students how to evaluate printed and web-based materials. Dramatic changes to the information ecosystem, however, present new challenges amid a flood of misinformation where algorithms lie beneath the surface of popular and library platforms collecting clicks and shaping content. When applied to increasingly connected networks, these existing evaluation heuristics have limited value. Drawing on our combined experience at community colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, and with Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national research institute studying college students’ information practices for the past decade, this paper presents a new evaluative approach for teaching students to see information as the agent, rather than themselves. Opportunities and strategies are identified for evaluating the veracity of sources, first as students, leveraging the expertise they bring with them into the classroom, and then as lifelong learners in search of information they can trust and rely on.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

The classic book “How to Lie With Statistics,” first published in 1954, is probably the biggest bestseller of all time on how to make sense of numbers. But it has left a troubling legacy—leading to a distrust of all kinds of statistics, even ones that can help make sense of things like today’s global pandemic.

 

That’s the argument made by Tim Harford, an economist and BBC journalist. And his research shows that the author of “How to Lie With Statistics,” Darrell Huff, took steps to use his arguments to actively obscure rather than to inform. “

Via Elizabeth E Charles