I've only played with google bookmarks for a few minutes, but I very much miss the social element that is the essence of Delicious. We had some extra time in class today so I showed the students the Common Craft video about Delicious and then showed them my Delicious account. They seemed intrigued by the ability to search others' bookmarks (especially since some foolish users make their searches of porn and other such matters a part of their public bookmarks). Is all of this overwhelming? Sure. But some kids will get it and bring others along over the course of the year, I think.
I want to keep pushing my pioneer model: we need to point out the frontier so that the pioneers can head out, set up settlements, and then help the others come along. If some kids end up only using google bookmarks, that's fine. All in all, I'm not totally convinced that the social bookmarking stuff doesn't yield far more junk than it does useful leads, especially if you don't devote a lot of time to it. But I think it has potential, and I'd like to let some of the kids play with it so that I can know how useful it might be. There are ways to set up a Delicious tag feed so that when someone you're following tags something new you can be alerted to it. This would be great if you identify a good tagger. Again, potential for lots and lots of junk, but also potential for hitting gold.
I hear what you're saying about giving the kids another on-line data base, but it seems to me that right now, the they need to start reading fun stuff about their topic. They need to see if they can get excited about what they've chosen to study before they start doing the hard work of research. I'm not sure that the data base will have enough fun stuff. Personally, while I find data bases great for finding things that I'm looking for, I find them less useful for browsing.
For browsing, I find that the web is much better. I feel as if they first need some time simply to read around and find out about their subjects (which are still huge, vague, and uncertain) before they start researching in any systematic way.
Actually, it seems to me that the next step (after the proposal) is to have a discussion that will lead to the development of a research strategy (to use the terms that Bridget used on her site--and how come SHE'S not blogging here????). Right now, there's definitely some initial interest in the topics and I'd like to feed this fire (camp fire?). I'm just not sure that the data bases--as useful as they are--are sexy enough.
[Actually, in some ways, finding a recent book about their general topic might be exciting, too. They would discover that the world (beyond the web) is interested in the same things they are.]
[Too many ideas right now. Also, not enough sleep. I'm glad you're enjoying your new computer. What did you get?]
Friday, October 23, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Searching for Blogs
I've been playing with the advanced search option of google and am a bit frustrated. When I search for blog posts by author (Joyce Valenza) only two posts come up, which I know can't be true. My concern is that her blog I read the most, The Neverending Search, does not come up. A search for title of YALSA (young adult library services assoc.) doesn't come up either. The good news is that Teaching the Research Process does come up and indicates yours truly as being the last poster. I did not try any other search engines. A few thoughts:
- Because I knew exactly what I was looking for, I knew when I didn't find it. I don't know that this will be a problem for students.
- How much prior knowledge does a student need when approaching the web? When searching for blogs? A blog search can turn up a tremendous amount of irrelevant info, which could prove just another distraction. Students will be learning the skill of searching for blogs (ok, maybe not skill), evaluating relevance, setting up a feed...
- Is it time to introduce another database? Search for some good overview journal articles might yield some experts to then search in blogs. Student Resource Ctr Bronze offers many full text reference books as well as popular magazines. Trip to the Reference section of BHS Library, including a mini lesson on searching the catalog. This could also be an out of class assignment. They could come in on their own, search the catalog, talk to a librarian if they need help. Laurie Sheffield is requiring her seniors to have a librarian sign off on her student's out of class library visit.
- Not sure about the feasibility of adding Delicious to the mix. The google book mark gadget might be all they need. NoodleBib will also help them keep track of sources. I think delicious has a higher learning curve than both google bookmarks and noodlebib.
- I love my new computer!
Thursday, October 15, 2009
iGoogle (response)
I'm finding it interesting to see which students are able to look at this project as open ended and which are still stuck on the more traditional way they typically do research projects. A few kids want to come up with a thesis and then look for research to support it. One kid loves hockey, so I encouraged him to read about hockey (as a business). He said today, "Well, there's only one hockey rule that I find controversial, so I don't think I want to focus on hockey." What? Researching to FIND a thesis (much less a topic) is surprisingly new for some kids. Research (as they see it) is what you do to SUPPORT an answer you already have. It's the filler that teachers require.
Interesting!
Next week, I'll say a little more about google reader, show them how to find blogs, and then give them time to play around. I want to get the class pioneers off and running so that they can hopefully bring others along with them. Let's keep in mind that for some students, senior paper ALWAYS requires some pulling of teeth; we're just getting it in October rather than in April. As kids start to find topics they like, I think they will race ahead. Until then, it will be slow going.
Again, just imagine if they'd been using Google reading since 9th grade. If there home page WAS an iGoogle page with a news feed or two on it, they might actually read the news now and then...and we will have succeeded in changing the culture!
Interesting!
Next week, I'll say a little more about google reader, show them how to find blogs, and then give them time to play around. I want to get the class pioneers off and running so that they can hopefully bring others along with them. Let's keep in mind that for some students, senior paper ALWAYS requires some pulling of teeth; we're just getting it in October rather than in April. As kids start to find topics they like, I think they will race ahead. Until then, it will be slow going.
Again, just imagine if they'd been using Google reading since 9th grade. If there home page WAS an iGoogle page with a news feed or two on it, they might actually read the news now and then...and we will have succeeded in changing the culture!
iGoogle
Wow, that was fun!
A few thoughts about the lesson on setting up an iGoogle page.
Students (5 or 6) who had not set up a gmail account prior to class lagged behind and exhibited a higher level of frustration.
"But I don't use gmail for email" That's OK. A gmail account is your ticket to all iGoogle and all it's gadgets. Other internet providers offer similar features to their users. We think iGoogle is ahead of the curve.
"I don't understand what we're doing!". (Well if you put away your Legal Studies homework...) A few students still have very broad topics. One student has no topic. It will be interesting to see if feeds help these students narrow their topics. One of the strengths of feeds is how subject specific they can be. I really, really like iGoogle's ability to search for feeds by subject. Again we are brought back to the earlier google searching lesson. I also like the number of blogs that come up in a search. As students are exposed more and more to blogs, they will become aware of personal blogs and blogs associated with publications like the WSJ. Perhaps students discover the idea of bias in the media or they discover a blogger to follow as they make their way up the corporate ladder. Do we even show them how to search for blogs outside of iGoogle. We may want to stress searching for feeds by an influential person that has come up in their research. Do they have a blog?
Once (if?) they find a good feed, they may be hooked. Ask students what they use as their homepage at home. I'll bet many students use their ISP homepage. Why not use your iGoogle page with a link to your ISP?
Let's stress how messy research is. If you're frustrated, you're on the right track. It's like getting into a comfortable position before you go to sleep for the night. Your frustration will diminish as you get more comfortable with your topic.
The tools we are showing you may not work for you, or for your subject. That's OK. We just want you to know the product before you reject it. Some of the tools may work for you now, or they may work for you later. Research is an individual unique process.
Monday, October 12, 2009
key words work
While encyclopedias are the way for kids to go when getting started with a project of this sort, I'm not sure they were convinced. They were introduced to these in elementary school, and their teachers have been pushing them to use more "sophisticated" sources ever since, so some seemed skeptical about returning to them now. Though they do use wikipedia...so perhaps we might have started with that and then moved BACK to world book and britannica. (Of course, the fact that we had major log-in problems didn't help us.)
The exercise also reminded me of one the biggest problems with the research process: while it makes sense to teach it logically, and it makes sense to start broad and slowly narrow (through key words and encyclopedias), researchers often get drawn in by small facts and discoveries, making the process NON-linear. This is what makes research exciting: finding something cool and THEN backing up and starting from the beginning. Until kids are excited about their topics, they won't feel compelled to do the grunt work of using encyclopedias and making lists of key words. I wish there was a way to catalyze this "aha!" process. So far, it seems to me that many of the kids HAVE found topics that they are excited about; my initial brainstorming activity (on the PSPWseniorproject.wikispaces site) does seem to have worked...for many. But kids have had few opportunities to pursue their own interests for projects, so this is new.
The next stages get even messier: while I need to keep them thinking about content, I also need to introduce them to a wide variety of tools (delicious, on-line data bases, iGoogle, Google Reader, Noodletools). I wish they had learned about these before! It's as if we're building the car at the same time as we are trying to drive across country.
The exercise also reminded me of one the biggest problems with the research process: while it makes sense to teach it logically, and it makes sense to start broad and slowly narrow (through key words and encyclopedias), researchers often get drawn in by small facts and discoveries, making the process NON-linear. This is what makes research exciting: finding something cool and THEN backing up and starting from the beginning. Until kids are excited about their topics, they won't feel compelled to do the grunt work of using encyclopedias and making lists of key words. I wish there was a way to catalyze this "aha!" process. So far, it seems to me that many of the kids HAVE found topics that they are excited about; my initial brainstorming activity (on the PSPWseniorproject.wikispaces site) does seem to have worked...for many. But kids have had few opportunities to pursue their own interests for projects, so this is new.
The next stages get even messier: while I need to keep them thinking about content, I also need to introduce them to a wide variety of tools (delicious, on-line data bases, iGoogle, Google Reader, Noodletools). I wish they had learned about these before! It's as if we're building the car at the same time as we are trying to drive across country.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Determining the validity of information
I'm now reading over the exercises that students did in the lab last week, the one where they had to answer 5 questions about the validity of the sites they found. Some kids get this, but others have a pretty limited notion of validity. One student writes, "The newpaper must be valid because it wouldn't lie about the information it gives to local citizens." How interesting! He's not alone in this. Despite the fact that many say that we live in a cynical age, when it comes to research, students seem willing to trust sources--IF it means (I suspect) that they can use the source and don't have to look for another one! Perhaps means "valid enough for me to get away with using." Which, I suppose, is fair enough. But it's something we'll have to consider as we go forward.
I thought we ran into some interesting issues with the links check. Some pages might have had solid information but few links and it's hard to get kids to understand this. We ran into this with the .gov sites as well as the newspaper sites (NYTimes, for example). Kids are looking for a cut-and-dried test: 50 links = OK; 10 links = not so good. Getting them to look at WHO was linking to these sites (not just the numbers) was a stumbling block.
But perhaps I'm being too harsh. They're just learning. This IS a step in the right direction from the position, "If I find it on the web, it must be valid." I sometimes forget that baby steps ARE steps forward.
I'm not sure how useful the wayback machine was, though, down the road, it would be useful for kids to check this. It's just not the first thing worth checking. It might be useful to have them find out info about the page's author or sponsoring organization. One student found a site from the Heritage Foundation and wrote that this info was certainly valid because a foundation was a large organization, not knowing the the H.F. was a very right-wing group. A simple google search would have helped him to discover this. I'll bring this up in class.
I thought we ran into some interesting issues with the links check. Some pages might have had solid information but few links and it's hard to get kids to understand this. We ran into this with the .gov sites as well as the newspaper sites (NYTimes, for example). Kids are looking for a cut-and-dried test: 50 links = OK; 10 links = not so good. Getting them to look at WHO was linking to these sites (not just the numbers) was a stumbling block.
But perhaps I'm being too harsh. They're just learning. This IS a step in the right direction from the position, "If I find it on the web, it must be valid." I sometimes forget that baby steps ARE steps forward.
I'm not sure how useful the wayback machine was, though, down the road, it would be useful for kids to check this. It's just not the first thing worth checking. It might be useful to have them find out info about the page's author or sponsoring organization. One student found a site from the Heritage Foundation and wrote that this info was certainly valid because a foundation was a large organization, not knowing the the H.F. was a very right-wing group. A simple google search would have helped him to discover this. I'll bring this up in class.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Reflection on our first lab day
[First lab day you introduced strategies for searching Google--quotation marks, site:, and key words; students played the Google game]
Reflecting back, Ann, you mentioned that you noticed that even after this first introduction, some students continued to revert back to their old ways, putting long, complete sentence questions into the search field rather than trying out key words or any of the other tools from the handout. [Note: I need to get a copy of this handout to post on the web literacy blog. It's a great piece.] Many students are trying some of the new techniques, but others are hard-core when it comes to sticking with their old search strategies.
I suspect that they will continue to do so until their old search method fails them. When they try their search method and find results--even though the results are not very good--they stick with what they've been doing up 'til now: simply typing in what they want to know.
I also suspect that this is how they think of the Internet: not as a huge data base to be searched but, instead, as a place one goes to get answers (in the model of Ask Jeeves and ask.com). That is, they see the purpose of the internet as being the answerer to their (or, to be more precise, their teachers') questions. It's like asking the genie! To give up this search method would also mean to give up this mental model--this metaphor--for the web.
Again, until the old methods totally fail these users, I'm not sure they'll invest the energy in trying to learn these new methods. Because Google's search is so "smart," it's able to pick out the key words from kids' questions and do OK (sometimes) without much else. Of course, as the searches get more complex, this won't work as well...but it still SEEMS to work, and that's the key. It's hard to unlearn an old habit.
Here's what we need, I think:
What if we made a presentation that went something like this:
1. Put a long question into Google and see what results come up.
2. Then pull key words from this question and do the search; see what you get.
3. Then use some of the techniques (quotation marks, plus sign, minus sign, etc.) and see what comes up.
4. Then use the site: function and see what comes up.
We'd have to stage this "demonstration" carefully so as to illustrate that method 4 really does get better results than method 1, but, if we could do it right, it might be powerful.
The more I play with Google, the more I feel as if there are a ton of shortcuts and techniques that I'm only beginning to know about. I wonder what sorts of Google guides there are out there.
Some resources I'll try to check out:
1. http://www.googleguide.com/
2. http://www.googletutor.com/google-manual/
3. http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/google/
4. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1264/12-Quick-Tips-To-Search-Google-Like-An-Expert.aspx
5. Google for Dummies (book)
Reflecting back, Ann, you mentioned that you noticed that even after this first introduction, some students continued to revert back to their old ways, putting long, complete sentence questions into the search field rather than trying out key words or any of the other tools from the handout. [Note: I need to get a copy of this handout to post on the web literacy blog. It's a great piece.] Many students are trying some of the new techniques, but others are hard-core when it comes to sticking with their old search strategies.
I suspect that they will continue to do so until their old search method fails them. When they try their search method and find results--even though the results are not very good--they stick with what they've been doing up 'til now: simply typing in what they want to know.
I also suspect that this is how they think of the Internet: not as a huge data base to be searched but, instead, as a place one goes to get answers (in the model of Ask Jeeves and ask.com). That is, they see the purpose of the internet as being the answerer to their (or, to be more precise, their teachers') questions. It's like asking the genie! To give up this search method would also mean to give up this mental model--this metaphor--for the web.
Again, until the old methods totally fail these users, I'm not sure they'll invest the energy in trying to learn these new methods. Because Google's search is so "smart," it's able to pick out the key words from kids' questions and do OK (sometimes) without much else. Of course, as the searches get more complex, this won't work as well...but it still SEEMS to work, and that's the key. It's hard to unlearn an old habit.
Here's what we need, I think:
What if we made a presentation that went something like this:
1. Put a long question into Google and see what results come up.
2. Then pull key words from this question and do the search; see what you get.
3. Then use some of the techniques (quotation marks, plus sign, minus sign, etc.) and see what comes up.
4. Then use the site: function and see what comes up.
We'd have to stage this "demonstration" carefully so as to illustrate that method 4 really does get better results than method 1, but, if we could do it right, it might be powerful.
The more I play with Google, the more I feel as if there are a ton of shortcuts and techniques that I'm only beginning to know about. I wonder what sorts of Google guides there are out there.
Some resources I'll try to check out:
1. http://www.googleguide.com/
2. http://www.googletutor.com/google-manual/
3. http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/google/
4. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1264/12-Quick-Tips-To-Search-Google-Like-An-Expert.aspx
5. Google for Dummies (book)
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