Scholarship, Practice, and Leadership - Essay Example

Students need to be motivated to acquire knowledge through the use of scholarly material and develop appropriate skills of critical thinking to synthesize information to optimize learning experience. The role of education leaders therefore becomes hugely important for creating a facilitating environment of learning within and outside academia for students. Significance of Information literacy Turusheva (2009) has broadly defined information literacy as the ability of individual to locate information and critically evaluate it for using it efficiently to improve learning experience.

Scholarly material is important for advancing knowledge and technology greatly helps to access myriad information at the shortest possible time. Google has become major platform for accessing information on internet, both by students and people at large. The teachers become key facilitators for imparting skills and promoting effective mechanisms of locating pertinent information in academia. Indeed, the leadership initiatives of educators have increasing become critical paradigm that shapes the mindset of young scholars and encourage them for information literacy that can exploit their ability to think critically.

Indeed, it has been acknowledged as important educational goal that promotes critical thinking and effective decision making for solving problems based on informed choice (Li & Lester, 2009). Information literacy has therefore emerged as vital tool for developing skills and capabilities for mastering the academic content and applying the same in learning processes as well as in their lives. The purpose is to enhance scholarship through practice and inculcate skills for life long learning. Information literacy is intrinsic part of education that should be fostered from the early education so that later on, students are better equip to synthesize information from various sources for maximising their academic achievements (Badke, 2009).

This is a very pertinent issue because unless the habit of information literacy is inculcated within students from their early years, they would not be able to discern the importance of credible information and apply it successfully within their education or use it in their lives. Russell (2009) has also corroborated that many students lack information competencies when they go for higher education. The gap makes it difficult for them to maintain their grades. Thus, it needs to be part of curricula as it broadens perspective of education and offers students with more opportunities to differentiate the important issue from the irrelevant ones.

Technology has considerably contributed to information literacy. The Google search engine is the most popular tool to locate academic and no-academic source of information. But internet needs to be used judiciously for optimizing learning. While it has made it easy for students to seek information, it has also reduced one’s power of concentration and reshaped intellectual capabilities. Carr (2002) says that internet surfers have increasingly developed the habit of skimming the text. This adversely impacts their learning processes as lack of focus and concentration also leads to lack of in-depth knowledge about important issues.

Scholars’ concern on the validity of the same is therefore genuine when they question the accuracy or credibility of the information and critical evaluation of the same (Badke, 2009;