Information Management Associates: Articles: C6: Students and the world-wide web

Articles, Evaluations and Reports

C: School libraries in the Age of Information

An international view by Sharon Markless and David Streatfield, published in School Libraries in View 17 Autumn 2002

C6: Students and the world-wide web

Ross signalled a powerful and interesting way forward for librarians in changing their roles by focussing on how students learn when using the Web. He suggested that the Web represents a real opportunity for librarians to make a difference to student learning because of the learning challenges inherent in its use. His two fundamental propositions were that:

information is not power; it can be disempowering
students have to work through huge amounts of misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.

He quoted research showing that students take only three to six seconds to decide whether information that they have found on the Web is useful or not, and that they tend to make judgements purely on what they see, for example, pictures and layout. Most students are unable to detect disinformation and do not pick up on misinformation. They fail to see that the 'stuff' on the Web is someone's construction (or deliberate distortion) of reality. Students need to develop a mental framework for making choices.

In the most entertaining part of the day, Ross offered interesting examples of websites that offer variations on mis-, dis-, and mal-information, before concentrating on ways of helping students to make decisions about:

what to believe
what to doubt
what to pay attention to
what to care about.

He contributed a variety of ideas about questions that students need to ask about any website; about on-screen indications of quality of information; and signs that information might not be what it claims. In this view of student development there is also an important responsibility for librarians to understand what constitutes quality information in different subjects, thus enabling students to adopt a critical mindset, or "Teaching students to read the screen."

If you would like to see more of Ross's views on the role of the library and principles of learning, a good place to start is with his keynote paper to last year's International Association of School Librarianship Conference which is easily accessible on the Web¹

Meanwhile, you may like to tackle one of Ross's Internet searching challenges, where the object is to get not more than three relevant hits. What would you search under to answer the question "How do birds sing?"

Todd, Ross Transitions for preferred futures of school libraries: Knowledge space, not information place Connections, not collections Actions, not positions Evidence, not advocacy International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) IASL Conference 2001 Keynote Paper: Virtual Conference Session http://www.iasl-slo.org/virtualpaper2001.html [back]

| articles | A | B | C | C1 | C2 | C3 | C4 | C5 | C6 |