Scholarship, Practice, and Leadership Essay

Scholarship, Practice, and Leadership Essay

In any profession or discipline, the individual's success, both in terms of getting the job done and in being accorded credibility afterward, is directly related to that individual's ability to seek out and use the relevant and credible information from various literature sources. That is the ideal, but in actuality it has become the first rule of neophyte research to latch on to and use whatever resources come up in an internet search engine. “Unfortunately, a number of the resources that are available on the internet are amateur publications that have neither been peer reviewed nor even vetted through a subject matter expert”(Russell, 2009, p. 17). The internet became filled with “a vast host of information that was utterly outside the gate keeping process and which varied in quality from an erudite treatise by a world scholar to the musings of your Uncle Frank” (Russell, 2009, p. 5). The point of Russell's discussion is that the present generation has grown up and gone through primary and secondary education with the internet an ever-present entity that was unknown to the previous generation. Misunderstanding its power and capabilities, teachers unfamiliar with the internet actively encouraged their students to make extensive use of that resource for anything and everything. In essence, the current generation has been taught to use the internet as its first stop for information shopping when any form of research is required. This cautionary tale is repeated by both Russell and Turusheva along with their learned observations and suggestions for valuating information literacy in order to amend the situation. “Leaders are able to unleash the potential of people by aligning values, systems, structure, and strategy. Because leaders place a