Teaching information literacy is interesting, because many students are information literate about a lot of things, but not about scholarly literature. In college, we're all about the business of scholarly literature. On the web, much is about user-generated content which is often the opposite of scholarly literature. But instead of complaining about the dreck on the internet, I'd like to think we can contribute to and improve the overall content on the 'net with well-written blogs and other "Web 2.0" tools such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube.
Talk about filling an information need - I used the web over break to figure out how to thread my 1960s-era sewing maching after I had lost my manual (I couldn't remember the path through the tension...). Without all the user-generated content on the web, I would have had to
schlep to the library, wade through a bunch of books on sewing to try to reverse-engineer the tension on my oldie-moldy sewing machine, and the regular public library probably wouldn't even HAVE books old enough to address my dated machine (did I say it was old?), so I'd have to either go to a different library that DID have older books that covered machines that were contemporaries of mine or get them through interlibrary loan... Okay, you get the point.
This article on Information Today talks about contributing to Project Gutenberg,, one of the oldest examples of user-generated online content; what can YOU do to improve the information online?
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