Reading and Activity #2

“Authority Figures” describes the relationship between Wikipedia and the “Encyclopedia Britannica”.  Bauerlein goes into detail about how popular and readily available Wikipedia has become.  He searched several topics in Google and the majority of the time, Wikipedia was the number one result to come up.  he goes into more detail about how the written text is becoming outdated by the time it’s published because with writing a book more research is involved and the process, overall, takes much longer than simply updating a webpage.  However, the editor-in-chief of Britannica states that they are consistently updating the digital form and therefore staying up to date but Bauerlein counteracts this statement by saying that it takes longer than a day to determine a new understanding and not just a current event.  In the end, Bauerlein discusses whether or not the web, one day, will be able to carry the same authority as a book does.  I believe that Bauerlein makes a very good point that college students often turn to the most popular result when looking up information on the web.  I am guilty of doing this even though I have heard multiple times that Wikipedia is not a reliable source.  However, it is difficult to believe that Wikipedia is not a reliable source because with further research I almost always find the information in Wikipedia to be backed up by a more reliable source.  Evaluating information isn’t something I regularly do unless it is a major paper that needs to be backed by creditable sources, otherwise I will look up a lot of my information through Google, which usually leads me to Wikipedia. 

The second article “Information Navigation” discussed how uneducated college students are at located scholarly information.  Foster states that although our generations of college students are technologically savvy, we are still unable to correctly use the internet and technologies for school related tasks.  The article goes into detail about how certain colleges now take the time and money to test students on their information literacy.  One of the reasons I am actually taking this class is to improve my ability to locate the correct information I need for scholarly research. Foster also talks about how universities were able to measure students by conducting certain tests and also the fact that many schools were hiring librarians to teach information literacy courses to their students.  It is the one thing that I believe students need to be more educated on today.  Personally I find it difficult to locate creditable material and then I question myself on whether or not the material I found will be accepted by my teacher.  I am hoping to learn the correct places to search for my information other than just typing something into Google and seeing where it takes me.