Reading Report #5

In this article, the writer talks about how our generation uses the web and technology to learn now more than ever. They make a very good point by pointing out the most used sources of gathering information for research paper which is Google and Wikipedia. These are often being used instead of scholarly articles. The ways schools are starting to get rid of the idea the google is the best place is by teaching students how to use the schools databases which hold good reliable scholarly information. Which is exactly what we are doing in this class. In is a very good idea in my opinion because I never knew about it till I was taught and now I use it allot since it has allot of good information and is easy to use. It is good that schools are taking notice and helping the cause by hiring people to teach students about information literacy. Overall, I think schools have come a long way in understanding how we use the Internet for research and how to better help us find good information. I do not agree with the people who are stated in the Cult Following part of the article that say schools are going about this wrong making it too much like a "code of law". I think no matter what students are going to have originality and it is very important for us to know how to get reliable information and no matter what, we will still use search engines such as Google since it is part of our nature. Google is most peoples home page when they log onto the net and still has a variety of easy to find and reliable sites. We know will just be able to have both resources to use. I do agree with Boolean operators become more and more obsolete, but I think it is still important to know and understand until the day they are totally obsolete. Lastly, I don't think that standardized tests will help show how competent a student is in information literacy, and it is just important to teach us that these things are out there.

Reading Report 4

Google is by far the most popular way to search for information. Like the article says, students no longer want to dig through books and search through the library to find a small piece of good information. We would much rather type in a few words and let the search engines work there magic and give us all the info. The word “Infobesity” is a very good choice of word on how students are today, we want a lot of information and we want it fast. I definetly do not agree with the one proffessor in the article that believed research should be a slow and long proccess of finding information. That is for the old days when it was harder to get information to a person so quickly. With todays technology, it should be easy to find a bunch on information and can only help to better our persuit on knowledge. In my opinion, it would be a great idea to make the journal databases google-ized, so like stated in the article, we can get a lot of “healthier” information instead of the large amount of false of bad information from Google. Libraries should have their own easy to search, search engines that are not only easy to use to find the right info, but also easy to find. Many students to not even know about these databases provided by the schools. The readability to use and ease of information will definetly become popular with students if they know in fact that they are getting good reliable information without getting confused on how to find what they are looking for. I also found it very interesting that these database companies are part to blame since they too are a buisness and are fighting to get the buisness of the university, which often means hampering the amount of good info. Hopefully we can figure out a way to get students to use these databases so they can have valuable and correct information.