Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency: Synthesis

Here’s another section of my upcoming chapter for Terry Freedman’s Coming of Age 2.0. This section examines information synthesis in a Web 2.0 information landscape. 

Synthesis and organization

This fluency involves the ability to see information patterns, to analyze information, to organize ideas, and to effectively weave together ideas from multiple sources to create a coherent new whole.
 

Web 2.0 presents the ultimate opportunity for teaching synthesis. Students who effectively use Web 2.0 tools, synthesize effectively.
 

Wikis promote a jigsaw style in which learners can divide a research task and share individual expertise and insights to complete an information gathering task or answer a driving question.  They may be one of the best tools for helping students to learn how to collaborate and build text-based knowledge as they incorporate information from multiple sources, consider diverse ideas, learn how to edit, integrate feedback, and negotiate the content of multiple authors. Additionally, peer collaboration and distributed authorship remove some of the “drama” associated with top-down assessment.  Wikis shift the onus of correction and improvement from the teacher to the community.  Teachers can assess the work of the group, as well as individual contributors to the wiki community through its history pages.  Bernie Dodge’s Design Patterns for EduWikis http://edwiki.org/mw/index.php/Design_Patterns_for_EduWikis offers strategies for designing thoughtful wiki synthesis projects. 
Blogging is also essentially about synthesis, with emphasis on the blogger’s voice as he or she engages in dialog and debate. Bloggers must ask such questions as: Based on my information mission, what do I choose to post? How do I respond to, analyze, interpret, personalize the ideas of others?  How do I build new knowledge synthesizing my own ideas with those of the community and with what I have been reading?

Blogs foster the kind of risk-taking writing that may not happen in the traditional five-paragraph essay. In this new form of public writing, students can share ideas before they are fully formed and solicit and use the ideas of others as they clarify build their own.  Bloggers learn to connect with audience, to express their messages in concise space and in more conversational tone. Bloggers learn to weave their own voices into personal, unique communication products, developed over the course of time.
New media projects as digital storytelling, inherently involve synthesis as learners select and weave words, images, sound, and video together into a coherent composition to conveying meaning, knowledge, and personal perspective. Using editing tools like: iMovie, Final Cut, and Garage Band, students compose and share original media, incorporating the relevant ideas and creations of others.  If we are to teach synthesis in a 21^st century landscape, we need new strategies for encouraging and assessing synthesis in these innovation creations.
Regardless of the format of the final knowledge product, drafting, outlining, graphing, storyboarding are essential stages in the process of examining information patterns and synthesizing knowledge. The commercial tool Inspiration (http://inspiration.com) has long been a strategy to help students collect and organize information and restructure knowledge.  New tools like FreeMind and Gliffy http://www.gliffy.com/ , offer learners similar features. Web-based tools like Writely (http://www.writely.com/) and ZohoWriter http://www.zohowriter.com  promote written collaborations by allowing the online editing of documents. 
We have new tools for aggregating knowledge. Teachers can help to synthesize the work of their classes, or other relevant blogs, on a SupreGlu page (http://suprglu.com/) –or by collecting RSS feeds–modeling approaches students themselves might take in aggregating their own research.  

Next time:  Web 2.0 and communicating results of research! 

 

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Compilation of cool 2.0 tools!

The October issue of Computer Shopper features a list of of 20 of the best Web 2.0 sites http://computershopper.com/roundups/200610_the_best_web_20_sites_1 compiled by Rick Broida. I can’t wait to try a bunch of them–myself and with students.

Here’s a selection of a few I find most interesting (as described by Rick Broida):

Ta-da List a free Web-hosted service that lets you whip up private or public lists of any kind: chores, favorite movies, business ideas, wines you’ve tried and liked, and so on. And you’ll love the satisfaction that comes from ticking off completed tasks. Ta-da!

Goowy  Goowy (the phonetic of GUI, or graphical user interface) blurs the lines between Web browser and desktop. It provides a Web-based operating environment, reminiscent of Linux, with e-mail, 1GB of file storage, instant messaging, games, contact and calendar management, and “minis”—small applets that provide at-a-glance access to to-do lists, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, search engines, and more. True to its name, Goowy wraps all this in an attractive, icon-driven interface. It’s a polished, impressive service, and while we can’t imagine anyone abandoning Windows or the Mac OS for it, it definitely proves the viability of a Web-based operating system.

Gliffy (this one I have played with a bit) This impressive Web-based tool lets you build flowcharts, floor plans, network diagrams, or just about any type of drafting you need. You can add colors, drop shadows, and even gradient fills to your shapes, while collaborating on drawings with other users. 

Shadows
Del.icio.us may have popularized the idea of managing your bookmarks online, but Shadows does it one better. It works on the same basic premise—tag, store, organize, and share your bookmarks—but with a much spiffier interface and more-compelling community features. After registering, you can download the Shadows toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer, or just create “bookmarklets” in your browser. You can also import bookmarks, though the service inexplicably makes all these setup tools difficult to find. Once you have everything configured, however, you’ll wonder how you lived without Shadows.
 

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Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency: Social Responsibility and Information Ethics

Here’s another section of my upcoming chapter for Terry Freedman’s Coming of Age 2.0. This section examines information ethics in a Web 2.0 information landscape.

Social responsibility and information ethics

These fluencies involve contributing positively to the learning community, practicing ethical and responsible behavior regarding information and information technology, recognizing the principles of intellectual freedom, respecting intellectual property, and ensuring equitable information access.

It’s increasingly tough to model respect for intellectual property in a world of shift and change, in a world of mixing and mashing, in a world of ubiquitous sharing, casual online communication, in a world of pirating. Debate continues to rage regarding how to balance users’ needs for access to information while protecting the rights of content creators to profit from their labor. And it is far bigger than our classrooms.

Students are rightly confused and frustrated. The Pew Internet & American Life study, Teen Content Creators and Consumers, quoted researcher Mary Madden in its press release (http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/press_release.asp).

Today’s online teens have grown up amidst the chaos of the digital copyright debate, and it shows. . .At a time when social norms around digital content don’t always appear to conform with the letter of the law, many teens are aware of the restrictions on copyrighted material, but believe it’s still permissible to share some content for free. (Lenhart & Madden, 2005, Press release)

Can we create a climate of information ethics? Can we guide students to behavior that is fair and just and respectful of intellectual property without compromising their creativity and enthusiasm? Today, a single student project might incorporate downloaded video clips, music, and art, as well as quoted text. It is also likely to be broadcast.

When projects stayed in our classrooms, limiting the amount of borrowed content and simple documentation were generally enough for students to ethically use the creative work of others. Limited use of the works of others in any media generally fell under the guidelines of educational Fair Use. With students regularly publishing and broadcasting beyond classroom walls, they need to take greater care and use new strategies when they borrow the creative works of others. On the Web, it is not always possible to get permission from or even identify a content creator.

Multimedia authoring and Web-based learning are way bigger and far more common then they were back when the Fair Use Guidelines for Multimedia (http://www.ccumc.org/copyright/ccguides.html) were created in 1996. This document, as well as CONFU: The Conference
on Fair Use, with its Rules of Thumb and Four Factor Fair Use Test http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/confu.htm, describe how educators and students may use copyrighted materials in limited ways.

We can help by teaching students about the Guidelines when they produce and post media. We can ease some of the confusion by teaching students about the new flexible protections and freedoms made possible by Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ licensing. While the “Big C” means permission is usually necessary for students to publish or broadcast content created by others, Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ presents a “some rights reserved” model. The nonprofit site shares a “flexible range of protections and freedoms” that allows authors, musicians, visual artists, and educators to share their work while maintaining ownership and copyright. The Creative Commons website features two comics, as well as Get Creative, a video describing the White Stripes’ approach to sharing their music without intermediaries http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/. These resources are designed to help explain the new licensing concepts to learners, educators, and content creators.

We can guide students to use the resources linked to on the Creative Commons site, to public domain resources, and to the growing number of copyright-friendly portals where individuals are choosing to share their own video, audio, images, and more. (Here’s a starter list from our website http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/cfimages.html).

The great conversation that is developing knowledge is not limited by geography or culture. Learners now have global reach. They are likely to be interested in using content created beyond the borders of their country and their limited legal understandings of copyright. How do the laws regarding copyright translate across multiple borders? We need to watch the work of the World Intellectual Property Organization http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en .

Even simple documentation is complicated by the fact that the official style books have not kept up with students’ new array of information choices. If we expect ethical behavior, we have to make it less painful for learners who want to behave ethically. Even before the examples hit the standard style manuals, we should facilitate students’ ethical behavior by adapting and modeling citation formats for blogs and wikis and podcasts and whatever is coming next. Interactive citation tools have been around for some time and do help students keep up with the shifting formats between formal print editions. Debbie and Damon Abilock’s NoodleBib http://www.noodletools.com/teaches about information options as it generates citations. This summer NoodleBib added an interactive note card generator. David Warlick’s Son of Citation Machine http://citationmachine.net/ offers guidance for the new communication tools as well.

Blog space appears rife with confusion about linking to and posting the creative materials of others. An About.com interview with intellectual property experts and law bloggers Kimberlee Weatherall and Eugene Volokh offers 14 Copyright Tips for Bloggers http://weblogs.about.com/od/issuesanddiscussions/a/copyrighttips.htm

The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a variety of prestigious university law clinics, offers explanation of intellectual property in the digital information landscape.

Cyberjournalist.net offers A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php, a document well worth discussing with student bloggers. David Warlick posts and discusses his own proposed A Student & Teacher Information Code of Ethics on his 2 Cents Worth Blog http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/08/23/getting-right-down-to-it/

Social responsibility is also about etiquette. I’ve taken to asking audiences to “blog kindly” when I present. Many of my colleagues (and I) have been stung by the words of defamatory bloggers who write with unnecessary venom about something we said. Bloggers do not have editors. Bloggers blog fast. Rash thoughts may be posted before a blogger really chews on an idea, before emotion subsides, before rational thought has time to take over. In classroom blogs, learners should argue and debate and criticize, but they also should be sensitive and respectful. As teachers, we can inspire a degree of impulse control for learners who blog.

While disagreement is evident, much of the online discussion relating to blogging ethics considers the following guidelines. Bloggers should:

• credit their sources,
• check their facts,
• admit when they discover they have made a mistake,
• avoid harming others,
• and disclose their biases

Some of the discussion rejects the notion that we need a code of ethics. Regardless of how strongly we feel or do not feel about guidelines for this changing and more casual writing environment, as teachers, we have some ability to shape its development in academics. I would like to see the next generation of adult bloggers treat each other with courtesy and respect. Simply having the discussion is important.

Social responsibility extends to interactions wikis, as well. In class wikis, we may need to discuss and establish guidelines for how we modify information and negotiate content. Guidelines for wiki construction could be class-generated, with the wiki’s about page serving as a kind of charter for behavior, trust, accountability, and contribution. These guidelines should serve to build the culture of the wiki. Even in an open authorship environment, participants should see both their freedoms and responsibilities to the community.

Lessons in social responsibility extend to the personal use of MySpace and other social networking spaces. Employers and admissions offices now regularly check “credentials” on social networking sites just as they do the credentials on students’ applications and resumes. All things being equal they may just pass on the kid with the beer, the joint, or the skimpy t-shirt. The students we care about need to know this.

This social responsibility standard also relates to democratic access to information. Teachers and librarians can act to prevent the growth of an information underclass. Students need to learn about accessible alternatives to commercial software. Teachers and librarians can guide learners to open source options and proliferating web-based applications. (Here’s our library’s list for students and teachers http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/opensource.html/.)

As teachers and librarians, we too have social responsibilities. While we look out for the safety of our students, we must also protect their access to the information and communication tools they need to learn effectively. We must speak up against school and government initiatives that prevent access to critical tools.

References:

Coggins, Sheila Ann Manue(2006). 14 copyright tips for bloggers. About.com. Retrieved September 2, 2006, from http://weblogs.about.com/od/issuesanddiscussions/a/copyrighttips.htm

CONFU: The Conference on Fair Use. (2004). Retrieved September 9, 2006, from http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/confu.htm

Educational Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines Development Committee. (1996). Fair Use Guidelines for Multimedia. Retrieved September 9, 2006, from http://www.ccumc.org/copyright/ccguides.html.

Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2005).Teen Content Creators and Consumers. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved September 4, 2006, from http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Content_Creation.pdf

Monitoring the legal climate for Internet activity. Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.
Retrieved September 5, 2006, from http://www.chillingeffects.org/

Online News Association. (2006). A bloggers’ code of ethics. Cyberjournalist.net Retrieved September 8, 2006, from http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php

Next time: Web 2.0 meets synthesis

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New Google Libarian’s Newsletter

The fifth Google Librarian’s newsletter was posted today http://www.google.com/librariancenter/newsletter/0609.html.

It features two new posters–one on using Google Scholar; the other is a quiz on Google’s slightly lesser-known features.

The newsletter also discusses news on downloading the classics:

Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You’re free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles — from well-known classics to obscure gems.

Google promises, “this is just the beginning. As we digitize more of the world’s books — whether rare, common, popular or obscure — people everywhere will be able to discover them on Google Book Search.”

My initial searches of classics like Thoreau, Twain, Austen, Shakespeare were pretty satisfying!

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Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency: Evaluation

Here’s another section of my upcoming chapter for Terry Freedman’s Coming of Age 2.0. This section examines evaluation skills in the Web 2.0 information landscape.

Evaluation

This fluency involves determining accuracy, relevance, comprehensiveness; distinguishing among facts, points of view and opinions; and selecting the most useful resources for a particular information need.

The traditional publication process made evaluation a much simpler skill back in the days before digitization, and in the days before information assumed new democratic formats. And while it was easier to teach evaluation in a controlled, black and white world, a world where resources fit into neat little boxes, we now live in a wonderfully rich confusion.

New, as well as traditional questions emerge as learners evaluate the information they find. What is authority? Whose voices are valid and when? Is it best to examine the collective knowledge of the public, or the expert knowledge of academics? What is the information context? Is it a casual information need or a formal or critical project? Who is the audience for my project? Is it an instructor who values scholarship and depth? Is it a breaking issue for which scholarly material does not yet exist? Is the best source scholarly, popular, trade; “on the ground” and timely, or retrospective and reflective; primary or secondary; biased or balanced?

Just as mega-store sites like Amazon address the long tail or the niche market, the Web, and blogging especially, promote the flourishing of the niche opinion, a great democratic concept, but a challenge for learners struggling to evaluate context and bias.

We’ve been offering advice for evaluating websites for more than ten years: use a healthy amount of skepticism when examining any source regarding authority, credibility, accuracy, relevance, and timeliness. We’ve suggested students perform Google link checks to see who has linked to a site in question or consult http://whois.org to identify the origin of a domain. Similar advice should be applied to Web 2.0 sources. Kathy Schrock offers a rich collection of evaluation tools for both 1.0 and 2.0 on her Guide for Educators (http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/eval.html).

How should students evaluate and select blogs as information sources? With blog space doubling every six months and technorati http://technorati.com tracking more than 37 million blogs (Sifry, 2006), how do we help learners to cut through the noise?

Blogs are essentially primary sources and can provide lively insights and perspectives not documented by traditional sources. They compare in some ways to a traditional interview, with the speaker controlling the questions. Ripe for essays and debate, blogs present not only the traditional two sides of an issue, but the potentially thousands of takes. And those takes take less time to appear than documents forced through the traditional publishing or peer review process. Blogs allow scholars and experts written opportunities to loosen their ties and engage in lively conversation.

Blogs require new types of examination. Some questions learners might ask as they evaluate blogs:

• Who is the blogger? With so many blogs offering spotty or nonexistent “about” pages, this may be a clue in itself.
• What sorts of materials is the blogger reading or citing?
• Does this blogger have influence? Is the blog well-established? Who and how many people link to the blog? Who is commenting? Does this blog appear to be part of a community? (The best blogs are likely to be hubs for folks who share interests with the blogger.) Tools like Technorati http://technorati.com and Blogpulse http://blogpulse.com can help learners assess the influence of a blog.
• Is this content covered in any depth, with any authority?
• How sophisticated is the language, the spelling?
• Is this blog alive? It there a substantial archive? How current are the posts?
• At what point in a story’s lifetime did a post appear? Examining a story’s date may offer clues as to the reliability of a blog entry.
• Is the site upfront about its bias? Does it recognize/discuss other points of view? (For certain information tasks–an essay or debate–bias may be especially useful. Students need to recognize it.)
• If the blogger is not a traditional “expert,” is this a first-hand view that would also be valuable for research? Is it a unique perspective?

For our 8th project on the Middle Ages, we illustrate the process of evaluation by pulling up a slightly cleaned up Google result list. Together with the classroom teacher, we model decision-making–students discuss whether or not items on the list would make appropriate choices for the particular research task. We look at portals, and blogs, wikis, student-generated sites, personal sites, and university sites. The teacher discusses whether it makes sense to use Wikipedia or other encyclopedias as sources. For many of our teachers these reference tools are good places to start. They may work as strategies for building vocabulary, identifying experts, and locating additional resources.

Over the past couple of years a big issue in learning to evaluate has been what to do about Wikipedia. Its content is heavily accessed; its articles appear on nearly every result list. Its democratic editing process provokes questions relating to the wisdom of crowds and the value of experts. Wikipedia forces us to examine the dynamic nature of information and to explore how knowledge is built. Whom do we trust and when do we trust them?

If a project has to do with breaking news, a hot topic, technology, or popular culture, Wikipedia may be the very best place to start. One of its advantages over print is that it is not limited by traditional publishing restrictions of cost or size. It is able to address the long information tail, providing something for nearly any interest.

But when teachers encourage students to find scholarly materials, Wikipedia may not be the best place to start. Academics, concerned about tenure and promotion generally find other avenues for publication. High school and university students need to know that teachers and professors will expect them to reach beyond Wikipedia.

I want my students to succeed in any academic setting. I want them to find the best possible sources for their specific needs. In some circumstances Wikipedia, or any traditional encyclopedia may be embarrassing to cite. In an interview quoted in David Weinberger’s Joho the Blog, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, speaking as a panelist responds to an audience question (http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/annenberg_hyperlinking_in_web_1.html):

I get at least one email a week from a college student who says he got an F citing Wikipedia. I write back saying, “For God’s sake, you’re in college. Why are you citing an encyclopedia?” We tell people to be aware of what it is. It’s pretty good but any particular page could have been edited five minutes ago, incorporating a new error. It’s generally “good enough.” (Weinberger, 2006).

Wikis can be an evaluation challenge. In many edit histories, contributions are more likely to be identified by silly screen names than academic credentials. As students evaluate wikis, they might ask a few questions:

• What is the purpose of the collaborative project and who began it?
• How many people appear to be involved in editing the wiki? Does it seem that the information collected is improved by having a variety of participants? How heavily edited were the pages you plan to use?
• How rich is the wiki? How many pages does it contain?
• Does the project appear to be alive? Are folks continuing to edit it?
• Does the information appear accurate? Can I validate it in other sources?

More next time–on social responsibility and information ethics

Sifry, D. (206). [Weblog] State of the blogosphere, April 2006: Part 2: On language and tagging. Sifry’s Alerts. Retrieved September 10, 2006, from http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000433.html

Weinberger, D. (2006). [Weblog] Hyperlinking in Web 2.0. Joho the Blog. [Weblog] Retrieved September 9, 2006, from http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/annenberg_hyperlinking_in_web_1.html

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Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency: Information Access

What follows is another section of my upcoming chapter for Terry Freedman’s Coming of Age 2.0. This section examines how we might weave traditional and emerging strategies into instruction as we approach information access in a Web 2.0 landscape.

Information access

Information access involves recognizing the need for information, identifying potential sources, and strategies for locating information.

In recent keynotes I have heard celebrated information specialists and futurists proclaim that we live in a good enough / why bother world. If people can easily find some information, they will not be motivated to find better or best information. As a teacher and as a librarian I find this approach impossible to accept. My math teacher colleagues do not stop their efforts at multiplication and division. They move as many of their learners toward higher applications and deeper mathematical thinking. Why should we not expect learners to master more thoughtful information seeking strategies?

We can encourage students to seek information energetically. That may include reaching beyond everyone’s favorite search engine or wiki reference tool. Though Google rocks it is not the only band in town. Google’s information reach is staggering, yet it may not be the best strategy for all information tasks. Innovation is thriving in the search world. In fact, a number of alternate search tools employ a less “vertical”, far more user-centered approach. We can introduce the flexible A9.com http://a9.com with its 2.0 like user-centered result lists and its transparent search across media formats–books, blogs, Web, video. Rollyo http://www.rollyo.com/ and Filangy http://www.filangy.com/ , offer a more personalized approach to searching. We can point to tools like Clusty http://clusty.com, where on-the-fly, expandable subheadings and related concepts compensate for students’ limited vocabulary and content area knowledge. KartOO http://kartoo.com/ and Music Plasma http://www.musicplasma.com/ represent a growing number of tools responding to the preferences of visual learners. In a highly effective, if more 1.0 approach, we can remind students of traditional subject directories like Librarians’ Index to the Internet (http://lii.org) or KidsClick! (http://www.kidsclick.org) or the many subject-specific portals that offer the significant advantages of selection and far less search noise. Debbie Abilock’s Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html and Laura Cohen’s (U. Albany) How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory (http://www.internettutorials.net/choose.html) keep up with the choices and serve as a guide for students.

The fact is that many of us can learn to use Google’s coolest features better to make the types of materials we want and need most to rise to the first couple of pages of our result lists. Teachers and librarians can point to the power of Google’s advanced search tools. (For instance, you are likely to find reports and lengthy documents by first searching for PDF as a file format.) We can link students to sections of Google’s excellent directory, for example its Issues page http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/

Because students will need to access both traditional and emerging sources, through both formal and informal information systems, they need understandings of both worlds. In subscription databases, it helps to know the underlying structure of controlled vocabulary and subject hierarchy. Students can use the official descriptors or subject headings to help them gather relevant content. They can select to search by either keyword or by subject and that choice really matters. Field searching offers users great precision if they know what they are looking for. While Google and other search engines assume an AND between words and phrases, databases continue to make use of Boolean operators. Simply using the word AND in a database, can mean the difference between a failed and a successful search. In nearly all search environments, using quotation marks to identify a phrase is an effective, time-saving strategy.

It pays to take time to do some old-fashioned brainstorming before attacking a search box. Developing a query involves deciding on the important words, predicting the words and phrases most likely to appear in your “dream” documents. Searching is an interactive, recursive process. We can teach students to mine their result lists to find additional words and phrases will allow them to use vocabulary they might not have originally considered.

Students have greater search power when they understand the newly tagged world. Tags are emerging as powerful tools, different from the structured controlled vocabulary and subject headings of databases. Technorati (http://technorati.com) now identifies more than 100 million author-generated tags (Sifry, 2006). As they search, students should be on the look out for the various types of tags assigned to the best information they find. Those public-created tags will assist them in gathering related content. They can discover information relationships by exploring aggregators like technorati http://technorati.com or del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/ . Student-developed tag clouds allow for browsing among related concepts, broader and narrower terms, names, places, etc. offering a freedom beyond outlining or taxonomy. A teachers who asks a learner to “show me your tag cloud” will see the various directions a student’s research, and her thinking, is taking.

We can teach students to control their own information worlds. By selecting relevant RSS feeds, they restructure search dynamics, channeling information to automatically flow in their direction, personalizing their own stream of information. As students find relevant information and news sources, we need to guide them to seek RSS buttons and capture those feeds.

According to the Pew study The Internet Goes to College: How Students are Living in the Future with Today’s Technology, (Jones and Madden, 2002) freshman college students favor commercial searches engines over academic databases their universities support: “Although academic resources are offered online, it may be that students have not been taught, or have not yet figured out, how to locate these resources” (p. 13).

Those who wait for information to be set free, those who wait for all the scholars and authors to put their work up outside of their books and journals, may be waiting a very long time. As Google strives to digitize the print content of university libraries, our K12 students may not recognize that they have substantial libraries of content already available to them that Google hasn’t yet and may never grab. They do not have to wait.

Hundreds of databases offer hundreds of thousands of valuable documents beyond those accessible on the free Web. Schools, state and national libraries and government agencies subscribe to content that is both developmentally and content-appropriate for learners. Unless we teach students about the enormous value of these reference sources, ebooks, magazine, journal, and newspaper articles, unless we value them ourselves, students will not find them or use them.

I could not conduct my own research without the university equivalents of databases created by such vendors as: EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, Wilson, to name just a few. Because our school culture values these sources, because they are designed directly to meet their information needs, our students have grown to love them as well. We point to them in our pathfinders. We create access to them both by name (http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/catalogs.html) and by subject (http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/databasessubject.html and we look forward to finding an effective federated search solution that will search across the databases, our catalog, and the Web.

Teachers and librarians must ensure that these valuable materials get used and are no further than a click or two away from learners. Students who do not have access to this substantial content, students who choose not to use them, are part of what I consider an information underclass. It is distressing that students and teachers settle for information that is good enough, when excellent is out there and just one further click away. Students need to be able to access the scholarly content their professors will expect them to grapple with, the business journals and reports their employers will want them to cite in board meetings.

If scholarly or professional content makes sense for your students and your budget does not allow an investment, free choices are increasing and we must link students to them. In addition to Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com and Windows Live Academic http://academic.live.com searches, our pathfinders might guide students to sources with limited full text journal content: the Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/, FindArticles http://www.findarticles.com/
FreeFullText.com http://freefulltext.com/I.htm
MagPortal.com http://magportal.com/. Google recently Google announced its News Archive Search http://news.google.com/archivesearch of both free and pay-per-use content and Time Magazine recently posted its free archive (http://www.time.com/time/archive/) which reaches back to 1923.

Interactive survey sites allow students to design and conduct original research. Using tools like SurveyMonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) and SurveyScholar http://www.surveyscholar.com/ and Zoomerang http://info.zoomerang.com/, students can easily collect data and graphically describe their results. Surveys are truly authentic experiences requiring students to navigate through some of the sticky issues of inquiry–predicting question issues, deciding how large a sample should be, designing effective question formats—single choice, multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus. The sophisticated reports these sites generate eliminate some of the challenging statistical work previously associated with playing with survey data, forcing learners to focus on understanding and interpretation

The internet fosters a search environment in which learners work independently, often in their rooms, often after midnight. There are fewer face-to-face opportunities for adults to intervene to help assess an information problem, focus a topic, suggest keywords and alternate vocabulary, or recommend a critical book or website or portal. While we should celebrate the independence of learners, we must recognize that any 15-year-old doesn’t really know what she doesn’t know.

We can guide students through the search process by creating online landscapes that help them make sense of their nearly limitless choices. Collaboratively created Web-based pathfinders can create information blueprints for particular units or projects. They pull together resources of multiple formats to meet the specific needs of the learning community. Using these tools, we can create schema to help students to think in terms of information clusters or buckets—the types of buckets they will be able to apply to future information tasks. As teachers and librarians in this new landscape, we have new opportunities to intervene, AND to have dialog, while respecting young people’s need for independence. Librarians are beginning to move their pathfinders to blogs and wikis, to open them to students and teachers for collaboration and comments. They can suggest search strategies. They can lead students to information types– primary sources, literary criticism, biography, news. They can lead students to the variety of information formats—portals of streaming media, wikibooks, ebooks, blogs, ejournals. The internet offers us opportunities for examining global perspectives. As students research the issues of our day, we need to help them to discover the media of other regions—the streaming media, the newspapers.

More next time–on evaluation!

Jones, S., & Madden, M. (2002). The Internet Goes to College: How students are living in the future with today’s technology. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved September 4, 2006 from http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=71

Sifry, D. (206). [Weblog] State of the blogosphere, April 2006: Part 2: On language and tagging. Sifry’s Alerts. Retrieved September 10, 2006, from http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000433.html

2.0, About blogging, About learning, About libraries, Information fluency, Teaching Strategies, Wikis | Comment (1)

Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency: An Introduction

For anyone wondering where I disappeared to over the past couple of weeks, I have three fairly solid excuses:

1. School started
2. That dissertation stuff
3. I was completing a chapter for the second edition of Terry Freedman’s e-book (Terry calls it a “booklet), Coming of Age. You’ll find the current table of contents here–http://web2booklet.blogspot.com/. I’m flattered to be considered among so many visionaries and I can’t wait to read all of their pieces–content most of our journals will not publish till months from now.

The piece forced me to reflect on the new opportunities Web 2.0 presents for working to improve the information literacy skills of today’s learners.

With Terry’s permission, I will be posting sections of the chapter.

Web 2.0 Meets Information Fluency

Introduction
When they leave our schools, today’s learners will not be called upon to create widgets. They will be called upon to work together to thoughtfully use and create knowledge products.To be most effective, workers of the future will need to creatively blend several relatively traditional skills with emerging information and communication tools. And they will need to practice those skills in an information landscape that is genre-shifting, media-rich, participatory, socially connected, and brilliantly chaotic. To be most effective, students will need understandings of traditional information structures as well as understandings of the shifts in the way knowledge is built and organized

Two threads

Through my librarian visioning glasses, I see two threads—information fluency and Web 2.0– beautifully woven into rich 21^st century cloth as teachers and librarians who value thinking skills, inquiry, ethical behavior, and innovative student work hone their craft on a funky and vibrant 21^st century learning loom, with learners as collaborators.

About that new thread—Web 2.0–it is colorful and dynamic. Its fabric reveals new opportunities for collaborations, creation of media, and interactions with audiences never before imagined. Our learners already use this thread, the emerging collaborative communication tools of the 21^st century. The November 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Study (http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Content_Creation.pdf) revealed that 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered content creators. These 12 to 17-year olds have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, stories or videos online, or remixed online content into new artistic creations (Lenhart and Madden, 2005).

About that other thread. . . The traditional strand—information literacy– is a sturdy material. It is fiber that many of us digital immigrants carried over in our trunks from the old country. It too deserves to be unpacked and shared–woven through instruction and learning.

Information literacy or fluency is the ability to effectively and ethically use and create information. Although it has been described in various ways through various models, it is generally considered a process in which students (and the rest of us) recognize a need for information; formulate questions based on those needs; identify potential information sources; develop strategies for physically and intellectually accessing information; evaluate, analyze, synthesize and organize new information with existing knowledge; and effectively, ethically and creatively communicate new knowledge.

When we discuss information literacy, we are discussing the application of information problem-solving and decision-making skills in situations learners face in all their subject areas and in their lives beyond our classrooms.

Information literacy competencies are process skills. They will grow with students, even when current search tools and platforms are obsolete, when we move beyond Web 2.0. These skills have legs. They will serve learners even when they forget how to balance a chemical equation or how to solve for X. They prepare students to learn to learn.

Information fluencies are embraced by the American Association of School Librarians and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology in their Information Literacy Standards for Student Learners (http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslproftools/informationpower/InformationLiteracyStandards_final.pdf). They are woven through the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards (http://www.iste.org/Template.cfm?Section=NETS) , as well as the ICT Literacy Maps of the Partnership for 21^st Century Learning (http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/). They are also woven through the standards documents of most disciplines.

So, how do we interpret traditional skills for a chaotic, exciting, multimodal, socially mediated information 2.0 landscape? And how does our instruction shift as the information landscape evolves?

More next time!

2.0, About blogging, About learning, Information fluency, School culture, Teaching Strategies, Wikis | Comments (3)

Google’s free news archive

Today, Google announced its free news archive search –http://news.google.com/archivesearch

News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. In addition to helping you search, News archive search can automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods.

Search results include both free content–from such sources as BBC News, Time Magazine and Guardian–and fee-based content–from such sources as Washington Post Archives, Newspaper Archive, and New York Times Archives.
Those timelines are way cool! So is the ability to trace a news story back through the decades. A student investigating events in the Middle East might search for stories relating to Israel’s beginnings in 1948.
Result pages identify key time periods and publications on the left of the page. The advanced news archive search allows users to filter by date, source, and price.

Note: recently Time Magazine converted most of its archive to fulltext http://www.time.com/time/archive/

Also note: Many fortunate schools (like ours) have even richer archives of contemporaneous news–for instance in ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Facts On File, and other databases.

Linking to resources like Time and Google News Archive will help provide some degree of equity while we lobby for all learners to have access to quality databases.

Search Tools, Teaching Strategies | Comment (1)

Institute for the Future of the Book and moving the couch

I was so flattered to be noticed by the Institute for the Future of the Book Blog yesterday http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/08/library_wisdom.html

Ben Vershbow and Bob Stein commented on both my visioning chart and our Virtual Library.

The physical space of the library is still vital too, Valenza argues, and nowhere is this better conveyed than in this charming “virtual library” page she has constructed for the library’s home page (that’s her standing by the reference desk):

It seems almost too obvious to use the physical library as an interface, but I was immediately struck by how intuitive and useful this page is, and how, so simply and with such spirit, it creates an almost visceral link between the physical library and its online dimensions.

Interestingly, I have been spending so much time this summer criticizing my Web work and figuring out how to move the site toward more interactivity. Materials suggestion forms are coming. I’ve prepared new lessons of evaluating blogs as information resources. My new eighth and ninth graders are dying to blog books and I plan to (happily) put them in charge. I am working toward morphing our pathfinders into blogs and wikis to encourage contributions from and collaboration with learners and faculty. I am supporting several teachers–new and old–who are ready to blog and wiki their projects. Several can’t wait to tell digital stories with their students. Clearly, it’s going to be a 2.0 year.
But this post came at the perfect moment. While I struggle with my personal 1.0 vs. 2.0 demons, Ben and Bob pointed to why I am right to hold on to some of what has worked for me for the past ten years–a static, kind of organized, interface. My learners respond to schema, to metaphor. They respond to familiar structure and are accustomed to clicking on links before they load. The library image map represents a customized picture of the information landscape and creates loose knowledge categories, buckets or clusters for learners.

As I move many elements of the site toward interactivity, while I want many elements to be dynamic, I need to be mindful of what I think of as “Rob Petrie” syndrome. (Here I go showing my age again!)

When Laura moved the couch, Rob tripped. It happened at the beginning of each show and it was an easy lesson to learn and one I applied first to my patrons in the public branch libraries I managed. I may change the upholstery of my virtual furniture, but my learners have told me clearly, they like the living room as it is.

This may seem counter to the trends in knowledge organization that David Weinberger describes–movement from taxonomies (hierarchical trees) to tags (piles of leaves). Granted, my image map is but one representation–it does not anticipate all the words and schema users bring to it.  But the images–my own slightly organized piles of leaves–make sense to our particular community of learners.  The pathfinders and other finding tools reorganize the knowledge for various projects and various users.  My voice, their teachers’ voices–are embedded in the site.  The voices represent comfort and guidance and trust.

The couch stays put. Thanks Ben and Bob for affirming my choice and chasing the demons away.

About libraries, School culture | Comments (2)