Knowing when to cry uncle: Balancing instructional initiatives

Abstract

About five years ago, the University of Northern Iowa Rod Library began building a credit-bearing information literacy course from scratch. Envisioned to be something more than simply “how to use the library,” the course was also designed to focus on Google resources and the trends and issues associated with the online world of information. We named the course Beyond Google. From the start, we aimed to teach students how to be more effective and thoughtful Google users, and more skeptical consumers of information.