At Sea in a Deluge of Data
Thursday, July 10, 2014 at 11:59AM At Sea in a Deluge of Data is an interesting article by Alison Head and John Wihbey in The Chronicle of Hhigher Education.
I heard Alison speak at LILAC 2014 - her research looking at student IL capabilities reflect my findings from 2007. Her latest employer research findings again reflect mine The role of information literacy in addressing a specific strand of lifelong learning: the work agenda.
"after interviewing 23 people in charge of hiring at leading employers like Microsoft, KPMG, Nationwide Insurance, the Smithsonian, and the FBI. This research was part of a federally funded study for Project Information Literacy, a national study about how today’s college students find and use information.
Nearly all of the employers said they expected candidates, whatever their field, to be able to search online, a given for a generation born into the Internet world. But they also expected job candidates to be patient and persistent researchers and to be able to retrieve information in a variety of formats, identify patterns within an array of sources, and dive deeply into source material.
Most important, though, employers said they need workers who can collaborate with colleagues to solve problems and who can engage in thoughtful analysis and integrate contextual organizational details rarely found online.
Many employers said their fresh-from-college hires frequently lack deeper and more traditional skills in research and analysis. Instead, the new workers default to quick answers plucked from the Internet. That method might be fine for looking up a definition or updating a fact, but for many tasks, it proved superficial and incomplete.
It turns out that students are poorly trained in college to effectively navigate the Internet’s indiscriminate glut of information."
Of particular interest is that "employers said they need workers who can collaborate with colleagues to solve problems and who can engage in thoughtful analysis and integrate contextual organizational details rarely found online." I highlight this as it reminds me that John Crawford a former colleague and CoP founder member often points out that information literacy in the workplace is not an individual pursuit but one done in collaboration with colleagues as part of a team. The other important issue is the integratation of contextual organizational details rarely found online. So often we hear managers in educational institutions say that we don't need a library as everything is on the internet, as they justify closing the library and doing away with the post of librarian.
Other quotes that I liked where:
- the hardest part of research is figuring out the question to ask.
- knowledge in action," a kind of athletics of the mind aided by Internet-enabled devices, search engines, and pools of data from a wide variety of outlets.
- Knowledge in action means being able to sort through that growing thicket of information. This is a lifelong learning skill, crucial to health, wealth, social equality, and well-being. In an era of partisan fog and the polarization of many subjects, it is a skill vital for effective citizenship.
