Google is it a noun or verb? Is it true or are you pulling my leg?

The world of research has changed from the dusty World Book encyclopedias to the fast-paced world of search engines. But is this progress necessarily a good thing?

It wasn’t that long ago when information lived in institutions such as schools and libraries. The amount of limited but there was an implicit belief that the information hidden in the pages of reference texts was credible and universally accepted as truth. We trusted what was said was researched, at least in the eyes of a naive doe-eyed student, and that the biggest challenge was to make sure you have the right book before someone in your class gets it. Those days feel like an eternity ago compared to today.

Nowadays, the world of information is plentiful and readily available at the click of a mouse. Most of my current students don’t even know World Book, let alone what an encyclopedia is. And yet the same legacy belief that what is said on the screen is true and accurate information is an area that teacher librarians challenge continuously. The problem as I see it, is that the torrential flood of information is not always pure. The lines between fact and opinion are murky, the credibility of information (when you consider the commercial implications of controlling public thought) and anyone, including myself, can put whatever they want online even though I have no credibility nor currency to make those statements.

This is where the TL comes into play. Their capacity to guide students through the aforementioned flood, to make critical judgements on the validity of said information and to discriminate between fact and opinion is the necessity to navigate the information landscape.