Librarians as, um, Crap Detectors
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 10/6/2009
Frances Jacobson Harris, Joyce Valenza, and Harold Rheingold believe librarians are on the front lines in teaching students how to evaluate which sources are relevant and which are not. “Crap detection,” as the three panelists called it during their webcast conversation “Librarians and Truth Detection” last week, is the starting point for any decent research.“The crap detection is the easy part,” says Harris, the librarian at University Laboratory High School at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s what you do with it.”
Sponsored by The Future of Education, Harris, Valenza, and Rheingold (pictured) discussed what role librarians play with their students, particularly when it comes to teaching critical thinking, as Steve Hargadon, social learning consultant for Elluminate and SLJ Cool Tools columnist, moderated.
Banning access to sites, or discounting sources just because they’re from Wikipedia or YouTube, for example, is too simplistic, says the triumvirate. Instead, understanding the context of that information is key—especially as students determine what to use during their work.
“What we can do, and what we ought to do, is see what’s credible and accurate and learn what kind of information you should spread around,” says Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs (Basic Bks., 2003).
Valenza agrees. As the librarian at Springfield Township (PA) High School, she has her students annotate their work, pushing them to think of why they might have picked a particular article in their research, and even consider the author’s bias. To her, it’s no longer valid to ask whether a source is OK to use or not—but instead understand how to use that information.
“I used to be able to teach the evaluation of material in a much more black and white way,” says Valenza. “But I’m embarrassed of the way I used to teach this stuff. I really started thinking a couple of years ago that nothing is inherently good or bad. It’s what we do with this stuff and the context of the information.”
Photo by Joi Ito
