Access to information?

Tomorrow I am supposed to teach classes about evaluating blogs. Ironically, the more information I find on the net about blogs, the less I think I know. I learned about Technorati and Blogpulse and that neither identifies my blog during a search!

Of major concern in teaching this class is that students cannot actually access blogs at school. Our school district has blocked all student access to blogs. It makes it quite difficult to teach students to be information literate if they aren't allowed access to the information. I will have to guide them through the evaluation procedure by using my own log-in and a program called NetOps. NetOps allows the teacher to take control of all the student computers in the computer lab and has a demonstration mode--the students will see whatever is on my screen. So, I will walk them through some sample blogs and they will ask the questions that were suggested by Joyce Valenza at the 21st Century Information Fluency website: http://21cif.imsa.edu/rkitp/assessment/v1n5/blog_evaluation_assessment_v1n5.html. Then they will have to try to find blogs that relate to their research paper topics.

There is the question of equal access in this case, too. Not all of our students have computers at home, and even if they have a computer, many families have turned off their internet access as economic times get tougher (and some never had any in the first place). Other students must share the one family computer with parents and siblings. Many of our students work at night, so they may not be able to utilize the public library, and blog access is blocked in the school library. It's really a catch-22--how can we teach them to be information literate if they don't have access to the information in the first place?

As this economic downturn plays out, this will become an important question for schools and districts. Will we help students bridge the digital divide by providing access in schools, or will the digital divide widen along with the economic haves and have-nots?

Research and blogging

As a researcher who is exploring digital literacy, I thought it was appropriate to use blogging as one method to document and reflect on my research. One thing I noticed when I was writing my observations in my first blog, however, was the amount of self-censoring that was happening as I wrote. For one thing, I am aware that I must preserve student anonymity, so that will keep me from using student names and writing about individual students too closely. Certainly that has a negative side effect, since it may keep me from fully exploring what is happening with a student and from making observations in writing. I suppose I might have to keep a research notebook where I write down individual progress and observations, but then only post generalities. It is certainly something that points out the difference between private writing and writing in a public forum.

Yesterday, Kief and I mentioned to the kids that we are keeping blogs as part of our discussion of how to tell if websites or sources are authoritative. The student reaction in every class was the same--they were really surprised and some thought it was funny. Given their surveys at the beginning of this unit, they don't think of their teachers and parents as users of technology in the same way as they use technology, so their reaction doesn't surprise me. None of them actually asked where we had our blogs posted, but I wonder at some point if one of them will come back and tell us that they've looked us up and found the blogs. One student wanted to know if we were on Face Book, and we had a discussion about colleges using social networking sites to screen their applicants. The student said he had a friend who was denied admission to a college because of this (do colleges tell students why they were denied admission?) and many students knew from the news that Gov. Sarah Palin's future son-in-law had a Face Book page that was embarrassing. One student said, "Kids need to be careful about what they put on their pages--you never know when you might be in the spotlight."