Ah – American Students Aren’t That Different

Students Lack Legal Research and Information Literacy

That’s the headline on a piece in today’s Law.com. It pushes the value of Information Literacy as a key skill for all students and particularly law students.

They quote from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

“Information technology skills enable an individual to use computers, software applications, databases, and other technologies to achieve a wide variety of academic, work-related, and personal goals. Information literate individuals necessarily develop some technology skills”.

“Information literacy, … is an intellectual framework for understanding, finding, evaluating, and using information — activities which may be accomplished in part by fluency with information technology, in part by sound investigative methods, but most important, through critical discernment and reasoning.”

It’s particularly timely for me, since I’ll be teaching our summer students at lunch tomorrow about the Pitfalls of Googling, based on a couple of articles and a speech in Vancouver.

I’d be interested in whether others talk about how Google works, what it does, and what it can’t do. Anyone telling young lawyers about the invisible Web?

Are we doing enough for Information Literacy among tomorrow’s lawyers?For hints on how this might be done, see the Welsh experiment, and (let’s hope) at the law school in far-off Canberra.