Reading the Odds: Information Literacy in an Age of Infinite Choice
We tend to talk about information literacy as though it lives only in the library, somewhere between the database tutorial and the citation guide. I want to make the case that it lives everywhere, and that the most demanding test of a person's information skills is not an academic paper at all. It is the ordinary, high-stakes business of comparing options online.
Think about what an everyday reader is asked to do. Confronted with a dozen tabs, each promising the best price, the best review, or the best odds, they have to weigh sources that are all, to some degree, trying to sell them something. The grocery comparison site, the hotel aggregator, the sports platform: each presents numbers that look objective and are in fact carefully framed. Reading those numbers well is a genuine skill, and it is the same skill we teach when we ask a student to interrogate a scholarly claim.
Take the way enthusiasts research a betting market before they commit a penny. A careful reader will cross-check the figures a platform such as betpas publishes against independent sources, look for the terms hidden in the fine print, and notice when a headline number is doing more persuading than informing. Whatever one thinks of the activity itself, the method is pure information literacy: identify the claim, locate the evidence, weigh the source's interest, and decide.
My point is not to praise any particular site or pastime. It is that the evaluative habits we prize in the seminar room are exactly the habits that protect people in the marketplace. If we taught information literacy as a life skill rather than a coursework requirement, I suspect our students would thank us, and so would their wallets.
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