The New York Times > Week in Review > Course Correction: Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea

The New York Times > Week in Review > Course Correction: Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea: "NFORMATION literacy seems to be a phrase whose time has come. Last month, the Educational Testing Service announced that it had developed a test to measure students' ability to evaluate online material. That suggested an official recognition that the millions spent to wire schools and universities is of little use unless students know how to retrieve useful information from the oceans of sludge on the Web.

Clearly, 'computer skills' are not enough. A teacher of Scandinavian literature at Berkeley recently described how students used the Web to research a paper on the Vikings: 'They're Berkeley students, so, of course, they have the sense to restrict their searches to 'vikings NOT minnesota.' But they're perfectly willing to believe a Web site that describes early Viking settlements in Oklahoma.'

That trusting nature is partly a legacy of the print age. If we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the things we read in library books, it is because they have been screened twice: first by a publisher, who decided they were worth printing, and then by the librarian who acquired them or the professor who requested their purchase."