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With the systemwide Information Competence Initiative, strong efforts are underway throughout the California State University to integrate information literacy competencies into the learning outcomes of academic departments and disciplines. Such efforts place a high premium on helping students to learn correctly how to represent the language, thoughts, and ideas of others when writing a paper, creating a project, working in the laboratory, growing a crop, raising an animal, or engaging in any other type of creative or research activity; how properly to cite sources; how to understand and respect copyright laws and intellectual property rights in a physical and a virtual world; and how to avoid unethical behavior.
What is information literacy competency? The Presidential Committee on Information Literacy of the American Library Association stated in 1989 that "to be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information." Within the CSU, information literacy is understood as the fusion or integration of library literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, technological literacy, ethics, critical thinking, and communication skills (Information Competence in the CSU: A Report, 1995, p. 9). The goal is for all CSU students to graduate with a mastery of these important skills.
Why is information literacy important? In addition to the issues of proper attribution and fair use of existing scholarship, in the increasingly complex world in which we live, there is an abundance of print, electronic, image, spatial, audio, visual, and numeric information choices--all tempting to use, but not all of equal value. How can students judge the integrity and worth of information sources like these? According to a Google press release, more than 17 million Internet sites and 3 billion web pages may be available, plus huge amounts of print and multimedia materials. It is all too easy for students to become confused or overwhelmed. The issue is no longer not enough information, but the opposite. How can one teach students to systematically find, evaluate, synthesize, organize, and communicate information ethically, legally, and appropriately?
We, as educators, have an important responsibility to help our students learn proper research procedures so they will avoid mislabeling the passages of others as their own, "borrowing" the words of others by mistake without credit or acknowledgment, or taking shortcuts, that, at minimum, produce sloppy if not dishonest scholarship.
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