“Google Reigns Triumphant”?: Stemming the Tide of Googlitis via Collaborative, Situated Information Literacy Instruction

Abstract

Googlitis, the overreliance on search engines for research and the resulting development of poor searching skills, is a recognized problem among today's students. Google is not an effective research tool because, in addition to encouraging keyword searching at the expense of more powerful subject searching, it only accesses the Surface Web and is driven by advertising. American higher education unwittingly fosters the use of search engines in research by emphasizing results rather than process. Academic librarians emulate teaching faculty in their reliance on lectures, and their course-related instruction is limited in its effectiveness because it is constrained to one-shot, lecture-driven sessions. A more effective way to teach research is to collaborate with faculty via problem-based and project-oriented learning tasks that incorporate authentic discipline-specific information finding and critical thinking into assignments.

KEYWORDS:

• active learning
• collaboration
• information literacy
• library instruction
• problem-based learning
• project-based learning
• situated learning

Acknowledgments

I thank the following individuals for their contributions to the writing and revision of this article: my faculty colleagues in the University of South Dakota's University Libraries, with whom I have engaged in discussions of situated teaching and learning in my capacity as Information Literacy Coordinator, especially my instructional colleague, Prof. Alan Aldrich; Prof. Bruce Kelley of the University of South Dakota's Center for Teaching and Learning, who has provided me with a forum for teaching about situated learning of IL skills in which I have received valuable feedback on my workshops and assignments; Michelle Rogge Gannon and the participants in the Dakota Writing Project who critiqued my situated IL assignments during the summer workshops of 2010 and 2011; Freshman English Composition teaching assistants Virginia Haines and Dan Schweitzer, who experimented with situated learning assignments in their courses as a result of my teaching in the Dakota Writing Project; and two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable concrete suggestions for improving this article. All inaccuracies and errors are, of course, my responsibility.

Notes

1. I use the term academic librarian to encompass the various statuses that librarians inhabit in higher education: full-fledged library faculty, adjunct faculty, and nonfaculty academic librarians.

2. What I designate as project-oriented learning is more commonly called project-based learning (PBL). In this article, I refer to this method as project-oriented learning (POL) to differentiate its acronym from that of the more widely known problem-based learning (PBL).

3. Gremmels (1996, 89) aptly describes the lecture approach to IL instruction with the metaphor of the dump truck, which librarians “load as full as [they] can, back … up to the classroom, and unload … onto [their] students, burying them in teaching.”

4. Smith (1997) argues that declining numbers of academic librarians, increasing demand for library instruction, and the need to integrate IL throughout the curriculum entail new functions for teaching faculty and librarians, as disciplinary IL trainers and IL instructional experts/consultants, respectively. Leibiger (2011) echoes this call for a realignment of teaching responsibilities, pointing out the different teaching and communication channels that can be used to “train the trainer.” While the implementation of these suggestions would certainly further attempts to situate IL in disciplinary instruction, these developments are beyond the scope of this study.

5. This assignment, while situated in the field of organizational communication, is typical of research assignments in many social sciences disciplines.