Tag Archives: information literacy

Is Wikipedia reliable for research? The best way to use it

Reading, Writing, Research Posted on by  

Everyone needs to find information for some purpose. Therefore, everyone does research. This post, however, specifically means research students do for some kind of paper. What role can Wikipedia play in research from elementary school to doctoral dissertations? Some people seem to think that research means looking at Wikipedia articles. Including people who should know better. In 2016, Apple hired Ruslan Salakhutdinov as its first Director of Artificial Intelligence. One announcement quoted him as saying, “We’re working on the idea of trying to use external knowledge bases, If I ask you something about a particular thing, can your system basically go to Wikipedia, read a few different articles, learn some facts about the world, and provide you with the right answer?” Wouldn’t it be more useful for an artificial intelligence program to extract information from professional literature?

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Social media and the evolution of information literacy

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“Information literacy” is a term most often associated with academic libraries. Sometime in the 1980s, it began to replace the older “bibliographic instruction.” By whatever name, showing people how to use the library has long been one of the librarians’ core duties in any kind of library. Social media and search engines have made it more important and more complicated than ever.

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Have we stopped reading? Becoming a post-literate society

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Have we become such a post-literate society that it even extends to how we use libraries? I just read another tiresome puff piece about how the library isn’t obsolete. This one especially highlights how millennials (people ages 18-35) visit the library more than any other generation. But do they read? The article gives only passing notice to books. I don’t find “read” or related words anywhere in the article.

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Chicago Public Schools vs school libraries

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Harold Howe, the author of Thinking about Our Kids, has said, “What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.” They must not think much about education in Chicago these days. They have taken school librarians out of the library and assigned them to classroom teaching. I learned of the problem from a report on National Public Radio. I lived in the Chicago area for more than 20 years, and during the last 15 years or so of that time, I was married to a suburban elementary school teacher. We lived through a strike. The news hit close to home, but I wouldn’t write about it if it had implications only for Chicago. Similar shenanigans appear all over the country, and not just with schools.

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Bad news from a good undergraduate paper

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Ever since I came across an online article claiming Benjamin Franklin as America’s first environmentalist, I have been looking for information that I can use in one of my other blogs. I just took notes on another online article called “What Would Ben Franklin Do? Influences of America’s First Environmentalist “ by Lauren Siminauer. At the time of publication she was “finishing her bachelor’s degrees in biology and psychology at the University of Virginia.” I have written quite a lot about research, sources, and using the library for writing term papers. Since Simenauer has gotten one of her undergraduate papers published online, it makes a good opportunity for making specific comments about how how an undergraduate student did her research—and how she should have.

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