Patrick Labelle and Bill Curran review the Info Research 101online tutorial. Curran says, "We're trying to make users aware that what they see on their screens can be very good but it can also be biased, unproven, ad hominem or completely false information." Photo by Spiros Bourboulis
Imagine you’re a student, and you get an assignment: write an essay on the history of Canada’s role as a United Nations peacekeeping force. If you’re like most, the first thing you’d do is pull out your PC and google “canada u.n. peacekeeping.” But nearly 4 million results later, where would you begin? Google and other search engines will help prioritize the list, but among the top sites will be personal blogs, legitimate but non-academic organization sites and online publications and encyclopedias, and countless other sources with absolutely no pedigree. And, although the Internet is great for cursory information, it’s no substitute for the depth and reliability of academic texts and journals.
“If you went into a library 30 years ago, you could be fairly sure that everything you found there had already been sifted and was indeed scholarly,” explains Bill Curran, L BA 69, director of Concordia Libraries. “But if you go to the terminal and you’re playing around on the web — and you can access our library at your home today, too — there’s no such filtering of information. The doors have opened, and we’re very pleased, but with that comes the need for information literacy and critical thinking that clearly wasn’t there 30 years ago.”
To attack this issue head on, Concordia Libraries have created a self-paced, interactive online tutorial, Info Research 101: Surviving Your Essay, to provide students and others with a concise yet thorough introduction to researching information for academic (or other) purposes. The effectiveness of Info Research 101 led the Association of College and Research Libraries to recently add it to its instructional database, PRIMO, and to choose the online tutorial as its site of the month for June 2006 (library.concordia.ca/help/ tutorial; see sidebar).
Launched in September 2004, the smartly designed tool was developed over three months by the library’s Information Literacy Working Group, headed by instruction librarian Patrick Labelle, working with a student graphic designer, Marc-Olivier Bergeron. It provides students the foundation for finding useful information, evaluating it critically and using it ethically.
With the ubiquity of information available today, having the skills to deal with it all has gained new prominence. As Jocelyn Godolphin, Assistant Director of Collection Services, points out, librarians used to need to provide library instruction. “Now,” she says, “it’s information literacy. I think that tells you that librarians used to care mainly about what was in the library because that was basically all the students had access to. We can’t limit instruction to what is inside our walls.”
Patrick Labelle explains that being information literate “means being able to deal with the complexity of information. It’s a set of skills and competencies that enables students or anyone to deal with information: how to define what their information need is, how to access that information, how to evaluate it and then how to use it ethically, avoiding plagiarism, for instance, or properly citing sources.”
He adds, “We’ve moved beyond showing how to do things and getting students thinking more about what they’re doing and the ways they can access information. With the web, anyone can write anything, so it’s much more important that students think critically about what they’re finding.”
Trying to reintroduce method, structure and discipline to the often frenetic approach to information that students have experienced in their highly mediated lives is what the Info Research 101 tutorial is ultimately about, as is trying to get them to understand the difference between value and volume. “Back in the early ’90s there were a lot of conversations around the value of information and how you arrive at it,” Jocelyn Godolphin says. “You don’t hear about that anymore. For students, not so long ago, finding information was the problem. Now there is too much information, and finding the good stuff is the problem.”
The 411 on Info Research 101
library.concordia.ca/help/tutorial
Concordia’s user-friendly online tutorial Info Research 101: Surviving Your Essay takes students through the research process step by step. Striking that hard-to-find balance between being succinct and comprehensive, Info Research 101 looks very much like the educational flash cards of yore, packed with concise, easily navigated information with examples, tips and activities. “We cover pretty much everything, including scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, books and the web,” Labelle says. “A lot of the abilities that one can hone from information literacy can be applied to any type of information.”
Info Research 101 starts by explaining how to choose a research question or thesis statement, how to ensure it is neither too broad nor too narrow and how to conduct some preliminary research.
Next, it covers the types of information resources researchers might need to use in doing an assignment, including Concordia’s library catalogue, CLUES, online article databases, magazines, journals, books and the web. It describes the features of each source of information, presents its advantages and limitations, and takes the student through exercises that provide hints on how to use the sources, including tips on how to perform more focused, productive searches in databases and on the web.
The trickiest part of the research process for students (aside from getting started on the assignment!) is how to evaluate the worthiness of the information. The tutorial instructs them to think about currency, authority, the purpose and point of view of the information, and who is sponsoring the production of the information, so that they can decide whether it is likely to be accurate, free of bias and valuable.
The tutorial wraps up by acquainting students with the ethical use of information, explaining why and when to cite sources and pointing them to citation guides. It does not take a heavy-handed approach to the issue of plagiarism. “We try not to put a negative spin,” Patrick Labelle says, “but instead turn it around and explain why we are supposed to cite sources and how it is a valuable part of the academic research process.” It’s not just about giving the author cited his or her due; it’s also about demonstrating the breadth and depth of the student’s research.
If you have any comments about this article, contact Howard Bokser, (514) 848-2424 ext. 3826, Howard.Bokser@concordia.ca
