Balderdash! is the common reaction - our students come to us knowing a lot more about IT than most of our faculty, and we often have to work hard to put enough IT "stuff" into courses to convince the students (and their parents) that the technology fee is justified.

Our students do have great facility with many IT applications - games, social media, e-mail, downloading entertainment materials, surfing the Web, instant messaging, word processors, and some even know some HTML. This is all to the good, but such facility doesn't necessarily include the is the understanding that a university education (supposedly) provides. (A fraction of our students don't have these skills, but are often overlooked.) The 2000 Freshman Norms show a large amount of computers use by new students. This doesn't necessarily translate to understanding; see the Southwestern University report cited below. The Freshman Norms report also shows that computer use by women is now nearly equal to that of men, but "a new survey item suggests that women lag far behind their male counterparts when asked about their computing self-confidence" (Additional material on the Freshman Norms). The yearly reports are available.

Is the above outdated? Don't two informative pages from 2022 on evaluating Sources or Websites relate to the "old days"? These add to a a 2016 study and all say the problem is still with us. (An overview by people at Stanford is shorter. Here's a shorter overview of this study.) A 2020 look at this situation reaches the same conclusion. A 2021 item Teaching in the Age of Disinformation supports the need for Information Literacy.
The "fake news" label is currently in use to dismiss anything that one doesn't agree with. How do we determine what is fake news? More generally, has the widespread use of the Internet for non-scholarly purposes supported and increased acceptance of distortions and worse? How the Internet Amplifies Cognitive Errors Today a lot of this is called "Digital Literacy" and much of the emphasis is on how to evaluate online information. "Students Fall for Misinformation Online. Is Teaching Them to Read Like Fact Checkers the Solution?" and Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information discuss this problem.

It's not just the understanding of IT, as Mark Bauerlein notes quite colorfully, referring to college students and how their involvement with the use of IT doesn't help them with their overall education, "We can be certain that they have mastered the fare that fills their five hours per day with screens - TV, DVD, video games, computers for fun - leaving young adults with extraordinarily precise knowledge of popular music, celebrities, sports, and fashion. But when it comes to the traditional subjects of liberal education, the young mind goes nearly blank. In the last few years, an accumulation of survey research on civics, history, literature, the fine arts, geography, and politics reveals one dismal finding after another. The surveys vary in sample size and question design, and they tend to focus on basic facts, but they consistently draw the same general inference: Young people are cut off from the worlds beyond their social circuit. While the wealth and education of young Americans has increased, their knowledge levels have either dropped or remained flat in the following important areas: History ... Civics ... Literature and the arts ... Geography ... Politics"(Chronicle of Higher Education 1/6/2006). He has more to say on this topic in The Myth of the Techno-Wizard Freshman which discusses ETS' 2006 ICT Literacy Assessment Preliminary Findings. A report from the Joint Information Systems Committee (Great Britain) describes similar thoughts. The Digital melting pot: Bridging the digital native.immigrant divide discusses this area as it applies to what students need in an educational environment, and discusses some of the simplistic assumptions and conclusions in the literature.

I'll continue to focus on the depth of understanding of IT.

The NRC (in the Executive Summary of a book cited below) calls the desired state "fluency" and describes this as:

Fluency with information technology requires three kinds of knowledge: contemporary skills, foundational concepts, and intellectual capabilities.

We don't consider that great facility with adding using a calculator represents an understanding of math, nor does reading speed represent an understanding of literature. HTML is a technique of presenting documents for the web. An understanding of presentation would cover structured documents, markup languages and metadata, and would be worthy of inclusion in university education. HTML, at best, is the practical technique of doing limited markup today - there is nothing wrong with learning it, but it belongs in the "lab section" of a course.

Why is the ability to operate the consumer tools of IT confused with understanding? It's because the broad use of IT is so new in education that the glitz is not generally distinguished from the core understanding. What better place than the Research University to develop this understanding in students? (Both undergraduate and graduate.)

The research output of the university includes students who go to graduate school, become postdoctoral fellows and research investigators. They will need understanding, in addition to techniques, if they are to be productive and innovative. More generally, the benefits to society and employers also come from students whose capabilities are enhanced by understanding. In addition, the students will retain an understanding longer than mere facility in operation of today's techniques.

Several groups have worked on defining topics included in understanding information, its formats, searching for it, and evaluating and processing it. (Evaluation is important, but it does not seem that students pay much attention to the reliability of information found on the Net. "Of Course It's True; I Saw It on the Internet!" by L. Graham and P. T. Metaxas in Communications of the ACM May 2003, 46:70-5. Also a Pew Project found "only one in six [search engine users] say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not.") A New York Times article, "Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea" by Geoffrey Nunberg (Feb 13, 2005, Page 4.4) describes problems students have in judging a web site's credibility. (This article may be available online through your library.) A more jaundiced view advocates throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Another example of the "information" area is SITE's description of Information Literacy, as "a key characteristic of the life long learner and is defined as the ability to access, evaluate, organize, and use information to problem solve, make decisions, and understand the ethical and legal issues surrounding information in formal and informal learning contexts. A more recent study (November 2016) Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online provides an overview, there is a longer Executive Summary Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning provides a depressing outlook.

These topics span the IT and Library/Information Sciences areas, but they form a cohesive whole. The Educational Testing Service calls the field "ICT" (Information and Communication Technologies) and convened a panel to consider ICT literacy. The 2002 report is available and cited below in the Resource Appendix along with other valuable resources.

My attempt to describe this integrated view succinctly is:
Understanding the choice of IT tools (including search engines ,) and the implications and tradeoffs of the choices made - and then being able to: search for, obtain and critically evaluate information resources using the appropriate portions of these information resources; and then to read, process (and otherwise use) and present information and results. (The processing of digital information, i.e. computation, and the presentation aspects are often ignored in discussions of "literacy".)

There must be an emphasis on understanding the concepts underlying these activities, the capabilities and the limitations of the IT tools, and the innovations possible in all of these areas - along with gaining facility in the use of these tools and the performance of these activities. This fits the traditional goal of a university to "educate" rather than to "train", with the inclusion of capabilities as the applied ("lab") part of education. Our goal is to educate students in the areas of information and information technology. This is more difficult than it might be, because it trancends multiple divisions in the university, involving the IT organizations, the libraries, all of the academic departments, and most of the student support organizations. All of these need to work together in order reach these goals.

I could comment at length (and will do so upon provocation :-) but in brief I think that the age of these requirements is showing. For today's needs, there is not enough specificity as to what is required, nor sufficient breadth. The examples, while reasonable, have an older flavor. I think that this situation, at least in part, motivated the effort at NCSU to develop the Information Technology/First Year College Basic Information Technology (BIT) Competency Project - Compact Plan. A report on deals with the initial BIT implementation.

The main points are:

• Know the laws and regulations that govern their use of computing and network resources on campus and on the Internet and are aware of the potential consequences of violations and have an awareness of Net ethics^* and etiquette

• Have a basic understanding of computing and networking concepts

• Have the basic information and skills needed to access the IT resources of NC State and the Internet

• Have the basic knowledge and skills needed to take a course with online components

• Have the basic knowledge and skills needed to take a course which requires the use of common software applications.

This type of planning is important, and I recommend that development of these capabilities in the students be considered throughout a university curriculum.

An excellent discussion of integrating information literacy into the curriculum is Information Competencies: A Strategic Approach by Honora F. Nerz and Suzanne T. Weiner which discusses the "need to integrate information competencies into engineering programs at the curriculum level."

Information Technology Fluency @ NC State is the Information Technology Division's Project to "Provide intervention for undergraduate students entering NC State who do not have a base level understanding of the use of technology that would meet faculty members' rising expectations." (There are many links to resources at this site.)

The Computer Science Department has a course (CSC 200) which provides "a survey of the basic principles of computer hardware, computer communications, application software, operating systems, microcomputers, security, impact on society, systems development, and use in organizations. Information is covered at a level of detail needed to be an informed user or consumer." The course has lectures and hands-on labs. Syllabus

GMU has specified a goal that all of its Liberal Arts graduates are to be computer literate - and has done substantial work towards this end. We all can benefit from the work which they have done.

A GMU program Technology Across the Curriculum (TAC) developed Information Technology Goals for Liberal Arts Students. TAC is described in an article in Educause Quarterly by Agee and Holisky.

The goal titles are:

1. Students will be able to engage in electronic collaboration.
2. Students will be able to use and create structured electronic documents.
3. Students will be able to do technology-enhanced presentations.
4. Students will be able to use appropriate electronic tools for research and evaluation.
5. Students will be able to use spreadsheets to manage information.
6. Students will be able to use databases to manage information.
7. Students will be able to use electronic tools for analyzing quantitative and qualitative data.
8. (Selected) students will be able to use Geographic Information Systems for handling and analyzing spatial data.
9. Students will be familiar with major legal, ethical, and security issues in information technology.
10. Students will have a working knowledge of IT platforms.

Basic level: Word processing (formatting and editing text, templates, styles, import/export material, mail merge); Web authoring (GUI HTML editing, basic HTML tags, image selection and preparation, image manipulation, simple Web site maintenance); hypertext (analyzing documents with links and hyper-enhancements, multi applications; understanding their uses and abuses);

Advanced level: Desktop publishing (mastery of industry standard layout software); image composition, advanced graphics, HTML, SGML, XML; electronic document structure (including site structure/navigation);

Ancillary: platform-independent programming, Web site management, server-side scripting;

Note that this Goal is described in a way which emphasizes understanding at a level which is appropriate in university education. It is not simply a listing of software packages for the student to use.

Additional entries into GMU's efforts are the Division of Instructional Improvement & Instructional Technologies and IT Training

The University Libraries has a web page How do I know if my sources are credible/reliable? with links to additional materia.

Enlightenment proposals for a new curriculum discusses "What does a person need to know today to be a full-fledged, competent and literate member of the information society?" (From the Educause Review.)

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators - Critical Evaluation Surveys " ... students need to be able to critically evaluate a Web page for authenticity, applicability, authorship, bias, and usability. The ability to critically evaluate information is an important skill in this information age. To help you get started with this process with your students ..." (with *many* links)

The ACRL (Association of College & Research Libraries) is proposing Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information."

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. Information literacy initiates, sustains, and extends lifelong learning through abilities which may use technologies but are ultimately independent of them.

Another shorter treatment of information literacy is Designing Internet research assignments: building a framework for instructor collaboration by David Ward and Sarah Reisinger at The University of Illinois, Urbana.

Internet knowledge is increasing steadily among instructors in the academic world. As courses incorporate more instructional technology, traditional undergraduate research assignments are adapting to reflect the changing world of information and information access. New library assignments reflect this shift as well, with term papers and research projects asking students to use Web sites as an information resource, in addition to the standard literature of periodicals and monographs. But the many pitfalls the library profession has learned in its own metamorphosis during the past decade are often repeated in these newer course assignments. The authors in this paper present a framework for librarians to interact with instructors to incorporate Internet resources into traditional term paper and research assignments. They suggest a framework for creating sample assignments librarians can take to campus instructional units, to show the teaching community at large what the library profession has learned from first-hand experience.

Especially see the sections on the common Pitfalls of Searching and Evaluation. It is an effective critique of the current state of student capabilities. It should also be recognized that large portions of on-line information are invisible to each search method. An Internet search engine generally doesn't see any of the for-fee resources. An OPAC may be quite limited in its indexing of, e.g. on-line journals. Students who can recognize and avoid these pitfalls are well above the current average.

There are also many University libraries which have developed guides and short courses on searching for and evaluating information on the Internet:

• Why we need to evaluate what we find on the Internet by D. Scott Brandt at Purdue U.
• Evaluating Information on the Internet by D. Scott Brandt
• A BASIC TUTORIAL ON SEARCHING THE WEB from the U. of SC Beaufort Library
• Internet Searching Tips and Advice from the VCU Libraries
• Criteria for evaluation of Internet Information Resources from Victoria U., Wellington, NZ (via web.archive.org)
• Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web from the Ithaca College Library
• Critically Analyzing Information Sources from Cornell U.
• Review of the Five Traditional Print Evaluation Criteria and adapting them to Web Resources at the Univ. of Washington.
  This material is much expanded in Evaluating Web Resources by Jan Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate at Widener U. They have additional links. Also see their book of the same name - it's in the D.H. Hill Library, and also is available on-line (see the library catalog.)
• How to Use and Evaluate World Wide Web (WWW) Search Engines from the Univ. of Washington
• How to Evaluate Web Resources a short "60-second" guide.
• Understanding the importance of Information Literacy from Education News
• The Information LIteracy Project @Philadelphia U.
• How To Evaluate A Web Site by LaJean Humphries. A law firm's library manager's approach. Also see the book "Web of deception : misinformation on the Internet" 2000, edited by Anne P. Mintz. (CyberAge Books) to which she contributed a chapter. This site has many links to additional material.
• Evaluating Your Sources "This site is designed to guide you in evaluating the information you find." Books, Articles and Websites - UNC-CH Libraries
• SAILS "Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills, is a project developed at Kent State University to create a tool to measure information literacy and assess its impact on student learning."
• Finding Information on the Internet a tutorial on searching, evaluating and citing - UC Berkeley
• Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask
• Evaluating Web Resources by Jan Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate.
• The Credibility Commons "is an experimental environment enabling individuals the opportunity to try out different approaches to improving access to credible information on the World Wide Web."
• Evaluating Web Sites An introductory tutorial from SJSU
• "This suite of guides and tutorials will help you gain the skills needed for college-level research." Guides and Tutorials on Evaluating and Citing Sources, Plagiarism and other research topics. From Ithaca College.

Libraries and many other organizations started the National Forum on Information Literacy to help meet the challenges posed by the emergence of the Information Age.

ETS' ICT Literacy Assessment measures "students' ability to navigate, critically evaluate and make sense of the wealth of information available through digital technology"

A few commercial services:

• Copyleaks "Plagiarism Checker for Education" (has a free low volume service)
• Turnitin
• Unicheck
• Vericite
• Ouriginal

Another site giving an overview is Understanding Plagiarism by T. Frick at the Univ. of Indiana. Two NCSU sites are Plagiarism -- What it is and how to avoid it from the Dept. of History, and the Libraries Resources on Plagiarism.

This resource is oriented to the USA, but at this point it may be useful to mention that there are cultural differences with respect to citing sources and as to what is considered plagiarism. Practices certainly differ internationally, but international students studying in the USA should become very well aware of USA definitions and practices and abide by them.

Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices from the Council of Writing Program Administrators emphasizes avoidance rather than detection. Also see "Top Ten" List for Preventing Honor Code Problems Before They Start and Resource Links for Faculty. A student's discussion of the motivation to buy papers satrs out "When US students see their degree as little more than a route to a job, is it any wonder that plagiarism is rife?".

The "fifth word" (or Cloze-style) method of testing (via "hole-ized" text) whether someone wrote or copied some writing may be a good test. (A downside is that it is inherantly confrontational.) Here is a free version which I provide.

Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism explores the complexities of these and related issues.

"Piracy" of intellectual property is a related topic. It has received a lot of attention over the years, with the focus changing from piracy of computer programs, to music, and now to movies. Studies on prevalence on campus has been written up in the Chronicle ( one article - and another article) and in the UF News (broken link) - with varying conclusions. Most campuses have regulations which condemn piracy for legal and ethical reasons.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) (UK) has a major site presenting their work on causes, detection and prevention of student plagiarism.

A relevant and broader resource (not available on the net) is "Academic integrity and the Internet" by Carrie L. Zelna, 2002, Ph.D. thesis, NCSU

Plagiarism and cheating in a technology rich environment.

Software plagiarism:

• "Moss (for a Measure Of Software Similarity) is an automatic system for determining the similarity of C, C++, Java, Pascal, Ada, ML, Lisp, or Scheme programs. To date, the main application of Moss has been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes."

• "CodeSuite ^TM is a collection of patent-pending computer code analysis tools." It is now available from Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation

The NRC has published a book Being Fluent with Information Technology Committee on Information Technology Literacy, National Research Council 128 pages, 1999. The entire book is available on-line at that URL. This is the book quoted near the beginning of this essay. The catalog description expands on the earlier quote:

Computers, communications, digital information, software-the constituents of the information age-are everywhere. Being computer literate, that is technically competent in two or three of today's software applications, is not enough anymore. Individuals who want to realize the potential value of information technology (IT) in their everyday lives need to be computer fluent - able to use IT effectively today and to adapt to changes tomorrow.

Being Fluent with Information Technology sets the standard for what everyone should know about IT in order to use it effectively now and in the future. It explores three kinds of knowledge-intellectual capabilities, foundational concepts, and skills-that are essential for fluency with IT. The book presents detailed descriptions and examples of current skills and timeless concepts and capabilities, which will be useful to individuals who use IT and to the instructors who teach them.

A book on an overlapping topic Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age (2000) is available from the AAUW. This book (PDF) emphasizes the importance of "Fluency in Information Technology", the phrase introduced by the NRC.

How Fluent with Information Technology Are Our Students? A survey of student from Southwestern University explored how FIT they see themselves - by Sharon Fass Mceuen. This study shows gender differences, and exposes strengths and weaknesses, "Our students are not coming to SU with conceptual knowledge of computers and technology, however, nor are they acquiring the knowledge during their four years here." This survey work grew out of an ACS (Associated Colleges of the South consortium) project.

Consumer WebWatch A Consumers Union site with a "mission is to investigate; inform; and improve the credibility of information published on the World Wide Web."

The Blog - what is it, who should use it, and when? (Should Literacy/Fluency include this?)

Web Credibility Research "Our goal is to understand what leads people to believe what they find on the Web." This research can be used in two ways - showing how to make your web site more credible, and showing what danger signals to use in assessing a web site you are viewing.

Internet Detective A "free Internet tutorial to learn to discern the good, the bad and the ugly for your online research."

"Fair Use" is a topic which should have an entire section devoted to it. It is within the US Copyright law and provides for the use of material under copyright without either permission or payment. (Proper citation is necessary to avoid plagiarism.) A Code of Best Practices for the use of communications scholars provides a discussion more general than this one scholarly area.

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers (Caulfield, 2017), a free textbook.

A Reminder That 'Fake News' Is An Information Literacy Problem - Not A Technology Problem A Forbes article about lack of Information Literacy in the citizenry and the problems which arise from this.

Why Your Newsfeed Sucks - Smarter Every Day 212 A 12 minute video on how to check the reliability of information found on the net - especially on social media. It's also an introduction to Mediawise (see the next link.)

"MediaWise is a groundbreaking digital literacy project that aims to teach 1 million teenagers - half from underserved communities - how to sort fact from fiction online by 2020."

The Debunking Handbook 2020

Fact-Checking Your Writing: Tips & Helpful Websites A straight-forward guide to fact-checking.

Media Literacy Standards to Counter Truth Decay

Smartphones, screen time, and digital literacy: Research and resources for parents and students More general coverage than "smartphones" implies. Has links to many relevant resources.

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