Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Challenges faced when seeking information on the web

For all the hype about the World Wide Web and its numerous benefits, there are in fact numerous challenges that users face when seeking information. According to Savolainen (2001: 211), the networked information environment epitomized by the Internet places new demands on people’s competencies in everyday information seeking. As the range of sources and their inherent complexity expands significantly, particularly on the web, information seeking has become considerably complex. It has grown from simple searching or surfing to encompassing numerous tools, such as online public access catalogues, search engines, full text databases, etc. As novice searchers, tertiary students may lack the capacity to make good judgments on the World Wide Web, a vast and often unregulated information medium.
In its objectives, the SIGIR WISI (Web Information-Seeking and Interaction) Workshop (2007: n.p) alludes to the fact that people engaging with this rich network (web) of information may need to interact with different technologies, interfaces, and information providers in the course of a single search task. The systems may offer different interaction affordances and require users to adapt their information-seeking strategies. Not only is this challenging for users, but it also presents challenges for the designers of interactive systems, who need to make their own system useful and usable to broad user groups. It is noted that the web’s growing support of information seeking, creation, and use for a wide variety of applications in higher education highlights the need for efficient and effective information seeking skills.
Kuhlthau (1999: 1) states that people using a variety of sources of information to learn about a particular subject, complex problem or extensive issue often have difficulty in the early phases of information seeking. This is particularly noticeable with students who have been assigned a research paper, but is not characteristic of students alone. She reiterates that advances in information systems that open access to a vast assortment of resources have not eased the user’s dilemma in many cases, but intensified their sense of confusion and uncertainty. New information systems may deepen the problem by overwhelming the user with everything all at once, rather than offering a few well chosen introductory pieces for initial exploration. The increased availability of non-directed resources on the web (information overload) has increased the need to maintain authoritative content / links.
According to Debowski (2003: 3), the process of information seeking is gradually increasing in sophistication as more services are placed online, and as the capacity of systems to provide extensive information increases. In higher education, this has heightened as students and staff spend increasing amounts of time working with various sorts of web-based electronic information. Walton and Archer (2004: 8) allege that web-searching skills are particularly problematic, given the challenges that the web poses to academic values and traditional research practices. Consequently, the technical skills of web searching are often taught separately from academic curricula or left entirely unaddressed. Leverenz, in Walton and Archer (2004: 8), is of the opinion that online sources challenge conventional academic disciplinary values. He adds that the web turns academic conventions on their head because of the absence of traditional publishing gatekeepers and quality indicators, unclear or collaborative authorship, the absence of dates, and finally, the transience and mutability of online texts in a medium where retrievability is not guaranteed.