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.