Information Literacy

Your instructor has just assigned a research project on the final year of George Bush's presidency. You hurry to the supermarket to purchase Star Magazine and the National Inquirer because they both feature articles on the Bush administration. Would this ever happen? No, because we all have a certain degree of information literacy. We just know who is reputatable in the magazine world. We trust encyclopedias and publications from institutions of higher education. But when it comes to the Internet, I would venture to guess that many educators possess a naivety that could be reckless in the classroom. I was one of those educators and I feel the need to apologize to my students after completing the activity called MAPping.

My language arts program is designed to include free writing. This is where students are able to pick a topic (with some restriction), research it and freely write about it. Our school calls them PROBEs, Practical Research on Basically Everything. One of my students had gone on summer vacation and visited the site of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination. He had pictures of the balcony and hotel but wanted to learn more about King's death. I thought this would be an excellent topic for his PROBE journal and encouraged him to Google Dr. King and gather information. I was so proud as he accumulated facts and made connections with his experience on vacation. Wow, isn't that what teaching is all about?! Well, I missed one important detail. One of the sites that my student could have accessed (as it remains high on the "hit" list on Google) is a Martin Luther King Jr. website created by a white supremacy group. If I had known how to MAP websites, a process where you can check the creator of a site and who is linked to the site, I could have ensured that my student was getting accurate, reliable information. It really bothers me that I don't know how many trustworthy sources my students have visited during PROBE time and for that, I am sorry. But thanks to MAPping, I now have a higher degree of information literacy and have the responsibility of passing this knowledge along to my students and colleagues.