Savvy Searcher

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Is Learning Facts a Trivial Pursuit?

April 10, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Flickr: JKing89

By Tasha Bergson-Michelson

Dear Savvy Searcher,

You wrote recently about the importance of teaching search skills. What do you make of the whole idea that kids no longer need to learn facts because they can find answers so easily online? Do you think that is true?

Concerned Teacher

When I was growing up, we used to say that you don’t need to know everything, just know how to find it. I firmly believe the same today, but I now appreciate that an integral part of search literacy is knowing enough background information to make informed decisions about what sources to believe. The ability to evaluate sources is one of the linchpin skills students need for navigating research both online and off.

As I argued in my last post, research skills can’t be taught in a single lesson, but must be cultivated slowly, over time. There are many technical skills that students should develop to learn more about a source. But no matter how well we can analyze web addresses, research authors, or uncover who owns a website, the most fundamental skill we have for judging a source is what Ernest Hemingway called our “built-in automatic crap detector.” What fuels this “crap detector,” if not a collection of learned facts?

In the lingering spirit of April Fools’ Day, consider the famous hoax Web site, Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. Now, I am not particularly enamored of using hoax sites to teach evaluation. Identifying a popular hoax is a whole lot easier than dealing with the more subtle types of misinformation students need to learn to avoid. However, the tree octopus site is well-constructed, and we can use it to practice reflecting on how common sense and background knowledge combine to set off the crap detector. After all, many students have seen or heard about some octopus in the past, and have the ability to surmise that one probably does not live in a tree. My experience is that most students encountering the tree octopus for the first time say, “That’s weird!” giving a great opening for discussion about how when common sense alarms go off, it is good to dig further.

Such a lesson can be both fun and empowering. The message is not, “There is so much misinformation out there and you have been wrongly believing it all,” but rather, “You already Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, critical thinking, search

Building Good Search Skills: What Students Need to Know

March 20, 2012 | 10:42 AM | By

Getty

The Internet has made researching subjects deceptively effortless for students — or so it may seem to them at first. Truth is, students who haven’t been taught the skills to conduct good research will invariably come up short.

That’s part of the argument made by Wheaton College Professor Alan Jacobs in The Atlantic, who says the ease of search and user interface of fee-based databases have failed to keep up with those of free search engines. In combination with the well-documented gaps in students’ search skills, he suggests that this creates a perfect storm for the abandonment of scholarly databases in favor of search engines. He concludes: “Maybe our greater emphasis shouldn’t be on training users to work with bad search tools, but to improve the search tools.”

His article is responding to a larger, ongoing conversation about whether the ubiquity of Web search is good or bad for serious research. The false dichotomy short-circuits the real question: “What do students really need to know about online search to do it well?” As long as we’re not talking about this question, we’re essentially ignoring the subtleties of Web search rather than teaching students how to do it expertly. So it’s not surprising that they don’t know how to come up with quality results. Regardless of the vehicle–fee databases or free search engines–we owe it to our students to teach them to search well.

So what are the hallmarks of a good online search education?

SKILL-BUILDING CURRICULUM. Search competency is a form of literacy, like learning a language or subject. Like any literacy, it requires having discrete skills as well as accumulating experience in how and when to use them. But this kind of intuition can’t be taught in a day or even in a unit – it has to be built up through exercise and with the guidance of instructors while students take on researching challenges. For example, during one search session, teachers can ask students to reflect on why they chose to click on one link over another. Another time, when using the Web together as a class, teachers can demonstrate how to look for a definition of an unfamiliar word. Thinking aloud when you search helps, as well.

A THOROUGH, MULTI-STEP APPROACH. Research is not a one-step process. It has distinct phases, each with its own requirements. The first stage is inquiry, the free exploration of a broad topic to discover an interesting avenue for further research, based on the student’s curiosity. Web search, with its rich cross-linking and the simplicity of renewing a search with a single click, is ideally suited to this first open-ended stage. When students move on to a literature review, they Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, search, student research

Can’t Confirm That Quotation? Search Google Books

March 7, 2012 | 5:00 AM | By

Flickr: dstrelau

Dear Savvy Searcher,

“We have hit a stumper. A colleague is looking for confirmation that Maya Angelou said the following (along with where and when):

‘We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.’

We have looked widely and been unable to confirm the attribution. Everyone on the web seems to agree that she said it but no one attributes it with a citation of any sort.

Thanks! I hope y’all can help. We are stymied.”

Joy Millam
Teacher Librarian
(Reprinted with author permission from the LM_Net Archive, answer posted here)

Dear Joy,

Google Books can help with this. What’s needed is the information that appears in a citation: the author, place, and date of publication. Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

Here’s what to do:

  1. Go to books.google.com
  2. Search for: Maya Angelou “We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color”. (Generally, I advise against typing in a whole quote. As we will see shortly, I would have done better to use fewer words, as suggested in the recent post on picking good search terms.)
  3. Notice that many books simply print the quote and credit Angelou, but a few, such as Jay Phelan’s What Is Life?: A Guide to Biology w/Prep-U and Myron W. Lustig and Jolene Koester’s Intercultural Competence, agree on a source: Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (New York: Random House Inc., 1993) 124.
  4. Within Google Books, search for Wouldn’t Take Nothing “diversity makes for a rich tapestry.”

This is where the search gets tricky. Why did the book itself not come up in the original Google Books results? From experience, I know that famous quotes and other texts tend to change as Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Google, google books

How to Choose the Right Words for Best Search Results

February 21, 2012 | 8:33 AM | By

Diane T. Sands

Dear Savvy Searcher,

My students keep wanting to enter their entire research question into the search bar. I keep trying to tell them that’s a bad idea. How do you teach students to identify the right words to use in a search?

Frustrated Educator

 

 

 

Dear Frustrated,

I had a particular conversation with a student a while back. It might sound familiar:

“But how do I know what the important words are?” The student looked up at me, perplexed. She stared back at her paper, where she had written Did George Washington ever write a diary? “Every word is important, or my question wouldn’t make sense!”

She had a point, of course. We had been discussing a method to distill a question into its components and turn it into a strong query, the string of words she would type into a search engine to look for her answer. Students have often expressed that it’s hard to identify “just the words they need.”

Based on how Google ranks search results, typing in a question will be more likely to bring back pages with a question for a title. In many of our everyday searches this is an easy way to find question and answer sites when we want them, but Q&A sites are not necessarily authoritative Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech

Search by Color? A Little-Known Trick to Find the Right Image

February 2, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Flickr: Richard Morton

By Tasha Bergson-Michelson

At its heart, clever searching lies at the intersection of critical thinking, imagination, and the savvy use of technical tools. Google Search Educator Tasha Bergson-Michelson begins a series of guest posts about innovative ways to approach finding information and the problems we can solve when we bring together technology, creativity, and education.

It’s right before bedtime on Sunday night, and your child just announced that she has a report due in the morning about heroes. Excited by the Super Bowl, she wants to write about teamwork among her personal heroes, the New England Patriots. Off she goes to Google to find some inspirational pictures of the Patriots in action.

When searching for the New England Patriots, you get a variety of images–but many of them logos, or fan created photo montages on a background of the team colors. If you actually want a screen full of pictures of people playing the game, what are your options? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, Google, search