Teaching Information Literacy
February 18, 2015
A big push for universities is teaching undergraduate students how to conduct research. Most of them simply go to Google or Wikipedia and think their work is done. Wrong! Research involves more than a few spins around the search engine and most students find themselves deficient in that area. LearnU wrote an article, “Get Your Search On: 40 Of The Best Search Engines For Students And How To Use Them.”
The article includes a brief spiel about information literacy and its importance. What is nice is it explains how search engines work:
1. “Internet user enters desired inquiry into the search engine’s search bar.
2. The search engine’s software gets to work and starts sorting through the millions of pages residing within its database in an attempt to find the best fit for the original inquiry.
3. Once all the action takes place behind the scenes, all relevant results are generated for the searcher and presented. Results are listed in order with the most relevant first.”
What is even better is that the article does not ban Google entirely from the approved academic search engine list. Google used to be a no-no in academic research, but now it is a useful tool with different features specifically geared towards academics. There are even nods to video and social media search engines. The article does forget to mention Blekko and Yandex as major search engines and they also forget to mention Google Video as a media search system.
Oh well, nothing is perfect and at least most of these are free compared to scholarly databases.
Whitney Grace, February 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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