Throughout this semester we will look at how to find reliable, truthful sources, but also how to look at sources in a more rhetorically-savvy way. This assignment will give you an opportunity to reflect on what you already know how to do and give you a sense of what we want to work on moving forward.

Step 1:

Reflect on the Stanford Study on Information Literacy" assignment. How did you do? (Use the Answers to Stanford Study Page to see the correct answers and compare them to your answers.) You may not have perfect information literacy right now, that is okay.Hopefully this will improve greatly over the next several weeks.However, you should take this opportunity to assess your skills and learn from your mistakes.Take a look at the feedback that you got on the Stanford Study on Information Literacy, and then answer the following questions (minimum 150 words), written in paragraph form:

1. Name at least one question you got wrong on the original assignment. If you got everything correct, name at least one thing you hadn't considered or one thing that you learned from reading the answers. Be specific, make clear references to the answers and describe any questions you missed and/or weren’t sure about.
2. How do you feel about your information literacy at this point? Are you surprised that you did as well as you did?Did you expect to do better?
3. Do you feel that this experience will help you to increase your information literacy moving forward? Why or why not?
4. What do you think this study says about how easy it is to spot "good" and "bad" sources? Why might "good" sources be important, if we want to learn about what is happening in our society?

Step 2:

Watch this video lecture (Links to an external site.). After watching, respond to the following questions. Your total response should be at least 250 words.

1. According to the video, what are the foundational questions of information literacy?
2. Based on the video, what does research have to do with creativity?
3. Based on the video, how is research collaborative?
4. Pick any 2 ideas from the summary portion of the video (the portion after the "to sum up" slide) and explain them in your own words. Why are these central ideas to information literacy?

Step 3 – Reflect:

Think about the two activities together and what they demonstrate about your information literacy. Which of the components in the video do you feel you need the most practice with? (Describe the component and why you don’t feel especially confident with this particular component.) Now that you have given some more thought to your own skills in this area, what advice would you offer to other students that might want to improve their information literacy? How do these activities affect how you think about what constitutes research in the 21st C/digital age?