"The information literacy of young people, has not • internet research shows that the speed of young • young people have a poor understanding of their • as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for • faced with a long list of search hits, young people • young people have unsophisticated mental maps of • as a result, the search engine, be that Yahoo or • many young people do not find library-sponsored
improved with the widening access to technology:
in fact, their apparent facility with computers
disguises some worrying problems
people’s web searching means that little time is
spent in evaluating information, either for
relevance, accuracy or authority
information needs and thus find it difficult to
develop effective search strategies
expressing themselves in natural language rather
than analysing which key words might be more
effective
find it difficult to assess the relevance of the
materials presented and often print off pages with
no more than a perfunctory glance at them
These points relate both to the current use of the
internet by young people and, a technology
generation earlier, to their use of early online systems
and CDROMs. There is little direct evidence that
young people’s information literacy is any better or
worse than before. However, the ubiquitous use of
highly branded search engines raises other issues
what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that
it is a collection of networked resources from
different providers
Google, becomes the primary brand that they
associate with the internet
resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use
Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if
simplistic solution, for their study needs"
..................
QUOTE FROM:
Information behavior of the researcher of the future
Conducted for the British Library and JISC , this report focuses on information seeking behavior of students born after 1993 (the Google Generation). Listen to presentation given and Q&A's when the paper was released on January 16, 2008.
photo:anitapatterson@morguefile
