Name: Lida L. LarsenInstitution: University of Maryland at College Park
E-mail Address: LL3@umail.umd.edu
Title of Presentation: Information Literacy: The Web is not an Encyclopedia
Format: Paper Presentation
Suggested Audience: Internet Trainers, Web Editors
Presentation Outcome:
1. Identify key elements for evaluating internet resources
2. Be familiar with citation methods for electronic resources
Presentation Content:
Internet Sources: To cite, or not to cite, that is the question.
It's no secret to any of us in education that, if this is truly the Information Age, we need to be paying significant attention to information literacy in every facet of our users' experience. While it's always been challenging to teach information literacy for print and mass media, we now have a global network of information at our fingertips that needs to be included.
The Internet has added a new dimension to information literacy - especially in the exploding growth of the World Wide Web. Nearly a mix between all other media, the Web democratizes information ownership, provision, and retrieval. The federal government is leading the way in publishing its vast array of information on the Web. On many campuses every student can publish a webpage. The Web allows us to speak directly to the purveyors of information in every imaginable field. Few reference librarians, publishers, or other mediating forces stand between us and information on the Internet, and specifically, the Web. While this does have advantages in expanding our information base and providing more accurate and timely information at the "click of a mouse", it also means, perhaps, more intellectual effort on the part of the information user/retriever to evaluate the sources of that information. It also means more education is neccessary for intellectual property and appropriate use issues.
This paper will discuss instructional units for evaluating information on the Internet. Evaluation elements to be covered include content scope, accuracy, bias, timeliness, permanence, authority and, also, citation methods for electronic resources.