Information Literacy!

So, my first comment is that I need to stop making resolutions that might be impossible to keep. After resolving to blog regularly, I had nothing to blog about! I didn't work with the students from November until now, so what was I going to write? Kiefer read and evaluated the student papers, so she will have more reflection on this, but I haven't had a chance to respond to it. But, today we have lots to write about!


Last week Cynthia and I met to discuss what more students needed to learn to be successsful in the research process. We came up with a list of "Information Literacy" skills they seemed to be lacking, especially, how to use search engines and how to critically evaluate websites. We noticed, for example, that students were citing weak websites as support, and also, that they didn't understand that sites had biases they needed to be analyze.


Since I am aware that even colleges are concerned about these issues, I decided to see what others were doing for these lessons. Through Kathy Shrock's Guide for Educators (http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/yp/iypabout.html) I found an amazing powerpoint created by the Teaching Library at UC Berkeley
(http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html. I am also a big fan of the Owl at Purdue, so I checked there to see what they had and discovered another excellent powerpoint presentation (owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/pp/Internet.ppt).

While of course both Berkeley and Purdue each handle the subjects a little differently, they are basically the same thing everyone is concerned about.


So, on Monday of this week I taught a lesson using adapted/modified versions of the Powerpoints. Hoping to help the students stay more focused, I used a program called NetOps--students are each logged in at a computer, but I am actually controlling the computers. As usual, while the students were paying attention, watching a Powerpoint still isn't the same as getting your hands into the mix yourself. They can watch me click on links, but it's still not the same as doing it on their own. During third hour, we barely took breaks in the lecture to let students try it themselves. Recognizing that this didn't work well, we put in an activity in the middle for the next class period. Finally, by the third class period (7th hour), we recognized that this was probably a two-day lesson that needed far more hands-on throughout the lecture. Today's class activity emphasized this lesson--it also reinforced the evidence that our "digital natives" don't really know very much about the nuts and bolts of webpages and the Internet.



Today, students were given "Web Evaluation Forms" from UC Berkeley (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Handouts.html#EvalForms)
and asked to evaluate 3 websites related to their research topics for their senior research papers.

It quickly became clear that students, even those who thought they had topics, had to figure out better keyword search terms for their topics, which was one of the first things we had discussed in the presentation. In addition, I noticed that kids were not just using Google's general search, as they had for last semester's paper, but were actually trying to use some of the other search engines that were mentioned in the presentation, like Infomine, Librarians' Internet Index, and Google Scholar.

As students began to use the "Web Evaluation Sheet" to evaluate the sites they found, their lack of knowledge became apparent (as did my assumptions about what they knew while I was presenting)--but luckily, they were willing to ask questions to learn the answers! First, many did not know what to do to find the page author--they did not know the difference between the sponsoring organization (who still might be the only party listed as responsible for the content), and finding the person responsible for the information on the page. As I walked around, I had to remind many students individually about looking under "about us" or some other area of the page (such as at the bottom), for who might be responsible for the information.

Students had many questions about how to tell if an organization was viable, how to figure out what an organization's bias was (heck, adults have issues with that question!) and how to tell if someone who publishes a page is a reliable source. At first, students had trouble with the word "credentials"--what does it mean to have credentials on a topic? So we came up with how to tell if someone is an "expert" vs. a hobby, etc. Look for a Ph.D in the subject area, or at least some kind of reasonable experience.

Well, this was tested when two different students found a website called "Crystalinks" for very different subjects. The students became suspicious of how someone could claim to be an expert on such different topics. So, when we trucated back to the homepage (I had to reteach how to do this many times), we found the site author's personal information and determined that she might not be a very good source for world history, but she might be a good source for someone researching alternative religious philosophy (Ellie Crystal has a Ph.D in metaphysical studies, which one student further researched to see if that came from a "real" college [his words]).

Another challenge for the students was finding where an updated publication date or copyright was located. It often did not occur to them to go to page links to find information--they expected everything to be right on the front page.

The learning curve was incredible. While we asked the students to evaluate 3 websites, most only finished evaluating 2 sites in the 50 minutes they had to do it. Their questions definitely showed they were thinking and processing as they viewed each site. As we told them, we're trying to develop "habits of mind" that will happen automatically in the future as they look at webpages for information.