Brian Bibb recently shared the final exam from a course he teaches called “The Digital Bible,” as well as providing more information about the course on his blog. Daniel McClellan also mentioned it. My own course on the Bible focuses on information literacy, and yet there are some significant differences between Brian’s course’s final and mine. In his, students are told not to use Google. In mine, they are encouraged to do so, in a way that retrieves reliable scholarly sources of information. But I had wondered whether it might not be a good idea to get students to at least do initial assignments – or perhaps in class activities – in which certain sources and generic search engines are not used.
What do others think? Is the best way to get students to learn to consult reliable and academically-appropriate sources to give them specific ones to use, or let them run wild on the internet with some basic guidelines and instructions, some combination of the two, or an incremental process that moves gradually from the one to the other?
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