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 21st 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!
