The story of a college banning the use of Wikipedia for class assignments, and the general issue of teaching information literacy, generated a good question from Lee.
Where can we find a text covering these skills?
And a good answer from Dave.
As for a text that covers those skills… it’s almost a contradiction. Simply trying to create one would necessarily point people in a given direction and take away the responsibility of combing through the knowledge.
The biggest problem with trying to teach research is that you can only really assess ‘best practices’ in a state controlled way. If you are going to judge is someone has done a ‘good job’ its going to be too subjective for most school boards.
Agreed. A “textbook” for teaching information literacy skills must be dynamic since the topic being address is constantly changing and now includes far more than just static text.
But, as Dave also noted, evaluating students on their understanding in this area is not going to be an easy task.
It’s certainly not something that will be accomplished with a standardized test.