e-Learning Tools
A recent posting in The Wired Campus had a link to The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies’ list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning compiled from lists of learning professionals. There are many of the expected sites, such as Google, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Wikipedia. Google Scholar was also included, but as the posting points out there are few scholarly and library resources on the list.
Librarians and faculty are acutely aware that too often students do not use library databases in their research, and educators are always looking for strategies to promote these resources and encourage their use. Information Literacy is a critical skill that students must have to take full advantage of the new information resources. Within the SUNY System Information Management is among the general education requirements that students must satisfy in order to graduate.
Millennial students know all about social computing and other technologies they are comfortable using. In fact they often perceive their facility with technology to be so thorough that they tend not to be interested in learning the information literacy skills necessary to effectively locate, evaluate and use the information they glean from the Internet.
The librarian’s role as facilitator of the research and information retrieval process has expanded and become more complex. The challenge for all educators is to broaden students’ e-horizons and familiarize them with the world of online scholarly and peer-reviewed literature so they are knowledgeable about how to find, use, and evaluate electronic information.