Digital Age Critical Thinking

I think information literate is hard to define. I think it would be hard to say someone is either information literate or illiterate. Information literacy  can be anywhere in between those two as well. I think many people have enough background knowledge to be able to say they are information literate, but there is always something more to learn. I think we can teach our students how to have skills essential to information literacy and we certainly can prepare them to be effective users. I think it is important that we teach them about other search engines. For example, as the reading mentions and like what we have discussed in class, many people never go beyond the first or second page of Google, and that doesn’t mean those top results are the most credible or relevant to their search topic, it just means those are the sites that are visited the most. I think it is also very important that we teach students about sources and how a site that uses credible sources might be more trustworthy than others. I liked how the reading mentioned that noticing how a source handles errors is a big way to tell how trustworthy they are. For example, when the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science had an error published they announced it in their blog, stating that they had an error and they provided links and full documentation of the issue. They handled their error very well and they announced it so that they people would know and they provided follow up information. That helps show that they are a credible source. I liked that the article mentioned this because I’ve never thought about that before and I thought it was interesting and it is a good way to tell if a source is trustworthy because it shows that they will admit when they are wrong and they will try to fix their mistake.