Com 705 - Communication Strategies

Scholarship, Practice, and Leadership Essay

Comfort Adjei

COM/705 Communication Strategies

August 9th. 2013

Dr. Stuart Gold

Students' Information Competence and its Importance for life-long Education

In the Article Students' Information Competence and its Importance for life-long Education, Turusheva (2009) defined Information Competence as "a library, computer, mass media literacy skills, technology skills, as well as ethics, productive thinking and communicative skills cluster or integration" (page 4). The role of a professor as a leader is clearly defined by Turusheva. It is a professor's responsibility to teach and guide students to acquire the necessary skills needed to gather all relevant information during research. As leaders already influenced by technology and the massive information stored in libraries, a questions to be asked is why are "half of the 1st year students evaluate their information searching skills as excellent (6%) and good (33%)" (Turusheva, 2009, page 3). As professionals such as scholarly professors' study to improve and maintain their knowledge as well as skillset, it is very important that remember the importance of information Competence in order to "prepare students for active life-long education" (Turusheva, 2009, page 3).

Why Universities Need Information Literacy Now More than Ever

Technology has made is easier to gather information from all sources very easily. "Students have already developed an ingrained coping behavior; they have learned to get by with Google" (Russell, 2009, page 92). The question to be asked is why are students using the Google for research at the University level? Information literacy should have been ingrained in these students from high school. Almost every community has a library; it is part of an instructor's responsibility to instill information literary their students. In Why Universities Need Information Literacy Now More than Ever, Russell (2009) stated, "students lack an understanding of what constitutes good quality scholarly information" (page 1). This is a problem that needs to be addressed immediately by all doctorial learners. The root cause of the problem needs to be identified and removed from our schools. It is never to fix such problems. Always demand sources that are researched based. Another is to request specific sources such as scholarly journals and articles.

infolitland

Going back to the question, "why are students using the Google for research at the University level?" mentioned in paragraph 2 of this paper, Badke mentioned in his infolitland