PRIMO is a means to promote and share peer-reviewed instructional materials created by librarians to teach people about discovering, accessing, ethically using and evaluating information in networked environments.
This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly. Written by Michael Caulfield, Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University, Vancouver, CA.
Information literacy may be defined as the ability to identify a research problem, decide the kinds of information needed to tackle it, find the information efficiently, evaluate the information, and apply it to the problem at hand. Teaching Research Processes suggests a novel way in which information literacy can come within the remit of teaching faculty, supported by librarians, and reconceived as 'research processes'. The aim is to transform education from what some see as a primarily one-way knowledge communication practice, to an interactive practice involving the core research tasks of subject disciplines.
People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine.
With more than three-quarters of a million copies sold since its first publication, The Craft of Research has helped generations of researchers at every level--from first-year undergraduates; to advanced graduate students; to research reporters in business and government--learn how to conduct effective and meaningful research.
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