Road work

2. Towards information literacy

How do you choose information sources in the digital realm?  Most of the time I don't give it a lot of thought because habits have built up over time - I follow well-beaten paths.
For example, if I want to check out a news story I usually start with the BBC news website. Why? Because the corporation covers just about everything that happens in the UK (though rarely in much detail), but more importantly it's trusted.
But should we, as student teachers, be giving more thought to  information literacy? In 'A Survival Guide for Teachers in Post-Compulsory' Education', Jim Crawley says:

"As teachers, we work with information at every stage of what we do, so we must be able to judge for ourselves what is rich and what is poor information."

A small example. For my Leisure & Tourism group I'd put together an exercise that involved them researching journeys to UK visitor destinations.

Without giving it much thought I decided to ask them to use the routeplanner pages at the AA's website to plot the journeys. It's what I do when I'm going somewhere and have for ages; it gives me mileage, journey time, an idea of how much petrol I'm going to use and, if I want it, a print out of direction.
Over time I got to trust it; it's the AA after all. But my group couldn't understand why I wouldn't just use Google Maps.
Everybody does, I was told. Google is what they use and they questioned why I would want to use anything else. And I didn't have an answer, other than 'because'.
Next time I think I really need an argument ready that backs up my choice of source, and that gets them to ask questions about the diversity of the information - rich and poor - that's available to us all.

Source:  'A Survival Guide for Teachers in Post-Compulsory' Education', Jim Crawley (Routledge, 2010)