Learning from Other's Mistakes - One Approach to Teaching Information Literacy

Everyone in the academic community is today confronted with an unprecedented problem. One click of the mouse can provide a student with enough source material to construct a doctoral thesis. Thus, the problem is no longer to locate the relevant material; today the difficulty is in separating the wheat from the chaff, or a more apt analogy, finding the few gold nuggets in the mountains of dross. The information literate student has to be able to evaluate web-based material which may be opinion disguised as fact. In this article we describe a short course entitled ‘Critical Journal Club’ and how after participating in this course, students become more critical, more sceptical and more information literate.