From Ken Smith: The habits of judgment and authority via Stephen Downes,
“In the context of a discussion of the reliability of Wikipedia, Will Richardson paraphrases a librarian who has struggled to know how to evaluate the content of a web site. She said something like this:
I’ve been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don’t really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not.
Whether she intended it or not, whether she even knows it or not, she has, I think, put her finger on one of the central failures of our education system. Adults, professionals, people who have completed their formal education and taken on their career roles, should be responsible — it is useful to pull that word apart — should be able to respond to the complexity they face as professionals, as citizens …”
Although I don’t disagree at all with the central tenet re the failure of our education system, I’m not sure it is the librarian education that has failed. Librarians did not make judgements about the disicpline-based content of traditional media – but they made judgements about the source of the content … reputable media outlets would have their own way of ensuring that content is “believable” and librarians would make meta-judgements based on the source and “known reviewers”. When there are no established “gatekeepers” of authorative knowledge, each individual has to make their own judgement from first principles – which highlights the simultaneous strength and weakness of an unlimited information source such as the internet.