Proposed Topic
The purpose research is to outline the importance of information literacy and recommendations for the future. Specifically, it argues for the importance of Information Literacy to individuals, business, and citizenship. It suggests opportunities to develop information literacy which addresses the information age in school.
Information Literacy and Leadership
Information literacy in individuals' lives has traditionally valued quality of life and the pursuit of happiness; however, these goals are increasingly difficult to achieve because of the complexities of life in today's information and technology dependent society. The cultural and educational opportunities available in an average community, for example, are often missed by people who lack the ability to keep informed of such activities, and lives of information illiterates are more likely than others to be narrowly focused on second-hand experiences of life through television. In an attempt to reduce information to easily manageable segments, most people have become dependent on others for their information. Porter (1985) stated that there is ample evidence that those who learn now to achieve access to the bath of knowledge that already envelops the world will be the future's aristocrats of achievement, and that they will be far more numerous than any aristocracy in history (p. 673).
Abridged Literature Review
Information prepackaging in schools and through broadcast and print news media, in fact, encourages people to accept the opinions of others without much thought. When opinions are biased, negative, or inadequate for the needs at hand, many people are left helpless to improve the situation confronting them. Information literacy, therefore,...
... middle of paper ...
..., argument and social responsibility: first-year students’
experiences of information literacy when researching an essay. Higher Education
Research & Development. Vol. 27, No. 4, 399-414. Retrieved from EBSCOhost
database.
Kuh, G. D., Gonyea, G. (2003)."The Role of the Academic Library
in Promoting Student Engagement in Learning," College and Research Libraries
64, 256-282.
Porter, E. (1986). The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society (Book). Public Administration Review, 46(6), 673-674.
Lauer, S. R., Yodanis, C. L. (2004). The international social survey programme
(ISSP): A tool for teaching with an international perspective. Teaching
Sociology, 32 (3), 304.
Zabel, D. (2004). A reaction to “information literacy and higher education”.
Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30 (1), 17-21.
With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer have the capacity to sit down and read a book, as well as his own personal experiences with this issue. The internet presents tons of data at once, and it is Carr’s assumption that our brains will slowly become wired to better receive this information.
Although the Internet has increased how much we read, it has deteriorated our concentration level. We are no longer able to read long passages and stay interested. We have resorted to skimming or finding a shorter version. It has also affected our ability to take an analytical approach to what we read. We no longer go beyond comprehending the information we take in. Outside of using the Internet to “enhance” our mind, Carr has also made the point that it is a daily involvement. We incorporate it in our everyday lives, because it is a source of entertainment or serves as some type of convenience for us.
As the world advances through the modern age of information and connectivity, having a literate society is crucial to being able to work effectively with the outside world. Jonathan Kozol’s book, The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society, portrays the life of illiterates in the modern world and argues that society has an ethical obligation to fix the problem of illiteracy. Kozol believes that illiteracy has the greatest effect on the education of current and future generations, the way food is consumed and wasted, and various economic costs to both illiterates and those around them. Kozol’s main point throughout his book is that society as a whole needs to face the problem of illiteracy, as not one single group or person can do it on their own.
Aldous Huxley, a renowned English writer, once said “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” The advancements that we have made in the recent years are astronomical. However, people of the present time are becoming increasingly dependent on technology and adversely influenced by the portrayal of the media. Initially media and technology were designed to facilitate a person’s life but as generations pass, it has become a liability rather than an asset.
Nowadays people don’t bother sitting down and going through an article or book from page to page, because it’s not a good use of their time as they can get all information faster through the web. By examining the behaviors of computer users, both authors argue that people don’t really care about deep knowledge of what they are learning or reading. People want to know how things work or are connected in an instant. They feel that they don't need to critically think about the information to help get them along in life. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” supports this claim by citing a scientific study from the University College London were the researchers examined the behavior of visitors to a couple popular websites and found that people using the sites displayed skimming activity (41). The users of the sites did not bother taking the time to read the articles, but they instead power browsed, jumping from one site to the other and hardly returning to the websites they had already visited. In addition, the internet has made people accustomed to new reading styles that people don’t fully comprehend or absorb material. They read things for apparent meaning. Carr also says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”
In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr disputes that due to new digital tools, peoples’ ability to retain and acquire information has been negatively altered. Even though, we have information at our fingertips, we often don’t take the time to soak in all the information. Carr mentions Bruce Friedman, a blogger, who finds it extremely difficult to read a “longish article on the web” and to try to focus on the importance of the text holistically (Carr 316). This is an issue that many can relate even Carr knows that, “ the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (Carr 314). Additionally, media theorist Mcluhan describes the net as “chipping away [mental] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (Carr 315). In essences, Carr states that we are having less of an attention span and consequently, less patience for longer articles (Carr 314). Therefore, this affects media outlets such as magazines, newspapers, and other articles, because they must conform and shorten their texts to fit the status quo that people safely enjoy (Carr 321). In addition, the net forces people to be efficient, and so, causes people to “weaken [their] capacity for deep reading” (Carr 317). People are becoming more driven on how quick he or she has to do something rather than think why this text is important. As a consequence, Carr believes that we are starting to lose our ability to be critical readers and
Moreover, Carr’s article mentions that by using technology of any kind, users tend to embody the characteristics stimulated by that technology. He says that given that the Internet processes information almost immediately, users will tend to value immediacy. To explain, Carr gives the example of a friend of his named Scott Karp who was a literary major on college and who used to be an avid book reader. However, since the arrival of the Internet, Karp skim articles online because he could no longer read as much as he used too. He cannot pay attention and absorb long texts ever since he read online articles. Internet...
Society is moving from a multidimensional approach to gathering information to relying on the Internet as our main conduit of information. The advantages (ease of use, instant availability) seem attractive, which leads to widespread adoption, but the interface itself may limit our intellectual capacity. As Carr observes from media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s work, “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (Carr). Because reading is not an automatic skill for humans, but a learned behavior, our flexible brains may well be building a different cognitive framework to process the new format.
But what good is all this information if it is not usable? "Almost all our resources are dedicated to gathering the raw material--information--and almost nothing is spent on the most important job of transforming information into intelligence" (Milton 1989, p. 6). Milton suggests that it is possible to have "negative information"--that which causes the recipient to know less than before because it is not integrated, applied, and transformed into knowledge. Essential to information mastery is understanding the relationship between data, information, and knowledge (TAFE-TEQ 1992): data are raw facts and figures, information is data organized into a meaningful context, and knowledge is organized data (i.e., information) that has been understood and applied.
In an era where all of the world’s information is readily available at our fingertips, it is difficult to imagine what life was like before the Internet. Today. people get anxiety attacks at the thought of a slow wireless connection. God forbid a webpage takes five minutes to load; we are left with rage and disappointment. Is the Internet making people stupid? Despite the fact that research on the detrimental effects of the Internet is still young, there is no doubt that the Internet is changing the way one thinks, but it is not necessarily making one “dumber.” What it is doing, however, is bringing to light some bad habits that are affecting the way we process information. The Internet is making us lazy and unable to memorize information.
4.Scott, Thomas J. and O’Sullivan, Michael K. “The Internet and information literacy: taking the first step toward technology education in the social studies.” The Social Studies v. 91 no.3. (May/June 2000): 121-5
Society is currently in a period of rapid technological change. Computers are becoming a household item as well as a highly advanced tool for most every workplace. The entire world is interlinked through the Internet and information is being transferred across the globe in a matter of seconds. Computers are getting smaller and quicker and the amount of information they can store is getting larger. In this information society that we are becoming, a new advanced form of literacy threatens to debilitate anyone who refuses to step into the computer age. Computer illiteracy endangers not only the individual but our nation’s economy. Whether you like it or not, computers are the new language and those who refuse to accept this will be left in the dust . Computer illiteracy must be addressed now or there will be a whole new population of specialized illiterates in America.
...ing the definition of media literacy. In 2006, Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, describes media literacy as “the ability of citizens to use, understand and create communications”(Ofcom, 2006). Compared to the first definition from National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy in the 1992, “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages”, the range of the concept has extended from just critically receiving and evaluating message to actually creating, and this is a clear implication that the media literacy has reached the field of online realm.
If one asked “What is media literacy?” a majority of people would be puzzled. Some would say that it is the ‘written’ part of media that is not usually seen or a written layout of how media should be produced. The bulk of people would say they have no idea what media literacy is. People in today’s society should be informed about media literacy. Society should be informed of what media literacy exactly is and how it applies to the field of communications.
Societies have evolved over recent centuries from agricultural communities to industrial giants. Sociologists, amongst others, are fascinated by the changes that have occurred in society, particularly since the advent of the industrial revolution to recent times. The last few decades have been referred to as the information era and this essay will be discussing the theories of several prominent authors, such as Daniel Bell, Frank Webster, Fritz Machlup and others, regarding the notion of an ‘information society’. The varying approaches have all have gained some momentum over the past few decades as technology advances. There will be some comment on their interpretations, how the information fits into our society, and the ways it has effect has possibly changed us. It will also see if any or all explain just what an information society is.