If you didn’t already hear about it (owing to their massive PR machine), Blackboard has debuted its blog about “the convergence of education and technology.” Whatever your attitude is about corporate blogs I think one thing this blog will do well is give a platform to leaders in the field of educational technology. Several interesting experts have already been featured. The most recent interview is with George Lorenzo, writer, editor and publisher of Educational Pathways, a newsletter that covers online learning in higher education. You can take a look at the interview, but I found one item worth mentioning to ACRLog readers. When asked what he thought were important issues related to learning and education technology, Lorenzo said:
Everything surrounding what information literacy and information fluency mean today is a very big topic. A new generation of students are Googling their research, instead of going to the scholarly research that one can’t find so easily on Google. For instance, I think there are many more problems related to plagiarism today. In K-12, students now customarily go online and copy and paste information so easily without appropriately attributing their research. This is a problem, I think, that is going to grow larger.
Anytime non-library academicians and information technologists are commenting on the importance, value, and need for information literacy or user education in public forums, that’s a good sign that our profession is getting the message out there about what we can contribute to student learning.