Teaching Internet literacy includes teaching the genres of information that can be found online. That includes academic articles, blogs, Wikipedia, reddit, social media, news, government and business information, reference material, educational material, data, and multimedia.
Students should learn to recognize whether they're encountering:
- Primary information: Original evidence, firsthand accounts, raw data, original research.
- Secondary information: Analysis, interpretation, or reporting based on other sources.
- Tertiary information: Summaries and compilations, such as encyclopedias and reference guides.
We didn't teach library skills when I was a kid because libraries were inherently superior sources of information. We taught library skills because students needed to learn how to find, select, and use information and the library was the only place to get that information.
Now we have to teach for both the library and the online world. The online world is considerably more challenging than the library was.
We have traditionally spent hours teaching children to navigate a few thousand books in a library, why would we expect them to navigate billions of webpages without instruction?