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Education

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

In making the case for digital literacy, Mark Moran singles out a New York Times profile of Stephanie Rosalia, a Brooklyn NY librarian. (Forbes, of course, does not link to the article.) He writes:

As a former corporate lawyer, I owe much of my success to effective research skills that evolved, with the help of skilled trainers, as new tools came along. As a former executive officer at a company that had 1,200 employees in 29 countries worldwide, I know that without adequate media literacy training, kids will not succeed in a 21st-century workplace. The “old school” ways of communicating won’t cut it; I’ve mastered those, and yet now spend each day re-learning how to communicate effectively in this new world order. And as the founder of a company whose mission is to teach the effective use of the Internet, I have pored through dozens of studies, and recently oversaw one myself, that all came to the same conclusion: Students do not know how to find or evaluate the information they need on the Internet.

In a recent study of fifth grade students in the Netherlands, most never questioned the credibility of a Web site, even though they had just completed a course on information literacy. When my company asked 300 school students how they searched, nearly half answered: “I type a question.” When we asked how students knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were “if it sounds good” or “if it has the information I need.” Equally dismal was their widespread failure to check a source’s date, author or citations.

Moran is CEO of Dulcinea Media, a Web publisher of easy-to-use search tools from authoritative sources; he was vice president and general counsel of 24/7 Real Media. The somewhat self-serving nature of the column should not, however, minimize the importance of its message.

Posted via web from Kathy Gill’s posterous

By Kathy E. Gill

Digital evangelist, speaker, writer, educator. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles! @kegill

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