Chapter 5 opens up with an informal reference to students having "street smarts" on the internet, which Maloy and the co-authors refer more professionally as the ability to "access and assess information" (p.114) Unlike textbooks and printed encyclopedias, students must realize who is credible, especially since information on the web is often dynamic such as Wikipedia, which means any regular Joe (not necessarily an expert on a subject) can modify the information. An exercise listed in the chapter is having students research a particular subject and use Wikipedia and Microsoft Encarta or a printed encyclopedia to acquire information. Students can then compare the information they've acquired from both sources.
To increase "street smarts in a digital world", we must increase ITFitness and ICT literacy. Students should understand how a search engine works. "Keyword queries limit searches by focusing on specific categories, narrowing a search to specific rather than general categories...it is useful to identify several keywords relating to the subject area before using the search engine." (p.119) From personal experience, if I use a search engine before I know what I'm looking for in specific I tend to get sidetracked filling my brain with information that might not be related whatsoever with what I'm looking for. Free-text searching is good since it is the most general. Keyword/exact match is more specific and requires putting quotes around the search query. Boolean searches use an operator such as OR, NOT, or AND which can be used to further categorize. I do not have much experience with Boolean search so I will post results on a future blog.
Another good skill when researching information is recording the vast amount of useful and relevant information. Electronic note taking programs such as Notestar can be added to the web browser toolbar. "When a student locates a web resource to save, clicking Notestar will enable data-recording prompts..." (p.121) Personally this is my first time hearing about Notestar so I'm excited to try it out! I will post results on a future blog. (download Notestar) Also, OneNote from Office 2007 serves as a digital notebook which can store information with the click of a mouse.
When I was younger I would read the encyclopedia and always look at the world map on the first page. I would often wonder what so many of these countries looked like. I remember the USSR being huge since this encyclopedia was printed during the Cold War. Now students can wonder and delve further into their fantasies about the world. Google Earth is the perfect program for seeing landmarks and other interesting sights around the world. Also Youtube can show us videos of these places, or different animals that we would normally never get to see unless we went to the Bronx Zoo.
The next question is which search engine is the best? Table 5.1 on p.120 displays a chart with search engines and databases and their respective specialized use. "In July 2007, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask were the most widely used search engines, accounting for 95 percent of the 7.7 billion searches conducted during that month alone." (p.119) For personal use, these search engines are perfect, and definitely useful for academics. As a teacher, I may assign the websites for students to obtain their information since I'll research beforehand whether or not the school censors them and also want to ensure safe online experiences for the students. Also it can prevent students from learning something that is totally false due to misinformation, malinformation, messed-up information, and then having to unlearn it. No matter what source students go through, they will certainly have to deal with useless information. The more they are exposed to it, the more practice they will have in deciphering what it is that is mostly relevant to their projects or queries.
Lastly, problems with plagiarism are discussed in the chapter from the ease of being able to copy and paste information from the internet. Often times student's don't even realize they've plagiarized. The problem stems from citing their work and citing improperly. One of the most useful parts of this chapter is James McKenzie's seven ways to combat plagiarism. I related this back to Bloom's taxonomy. Teaching students to think at a higher cognitive level makes plagiarizing much more difficult. Asking students to analyze, evaluate or synthesize new ideas from the information they've found will require more brain power than just finding the facts and explaining them verbatim.
Questions to ponder next week:
1) The internet is a great source of information, and a great place to discover new interests. In conjunction with the activity of comparing wikipedia to a paper encyclopedia resource, how does this change the students interests in new areas?
My hypothesis would be wikipedia puts students in a more linear learning mode such as wikipedia presents them with links that are related somehow to the previous page. With a paper encyclopedia, often flipping to random pages, usually ones with pictures will display a wider range of topics students might find interesting. The topics are selected at random but a smaller amount of information might be provided using the printed encyclopedia.
2) Will the use of internet resources such as Wikipedia desensitize students excitement in learning from a printed encyclopedia for the next generation?
3) "In a 2008 series on the future of reading, the New York Times reported that the number of 17-year-old's who read for fun every day declined from about 33 percent in 1984 to 20 percent in 2004. The number of 17-year-old's who say they never read for fun increased from 9 to 19 percent during the same time period." (p.117) The internet also takes away time spent writing things out by hand, also practicing writing in cursive. The first question to ask is "Is the New York Times a biased source?" The next question is "How can we increase students reading time using just books?"
