Google: the beginning of the end of student curiosity?

"Teachers and students alike report that for today's students, "research" means "Googling." As a result, some teachers report that for their students "doing research" has shifted from a relatively slow process of intellectual curiosity and discovery to fast-paced, short-term exercise aimed at locating just enough information to complete and assignment." (PewInternet.org)

The Past
Think back. Do you remember sitting in your library sifting through books and encyclopedias looking for information on a particular topic you were researching? With each resource you went deeper into that topic, learning more about the many facets that you had never even considered. Sure, there was some wasted time as you weeded out articles and books that were of little use to you. But even those resources provided valuable learning experiences, as you learned why they were not useful (too advanced, wrong audience, different point of view, too biased, etc.) Research used to mean building a deep understanding of a complex topic, it seems that today, student understanding of research has changed.

The Present
Google has changed our lives in so many ways. I can look up the address of a restaurant where I am meeting friends in 4 seconds flats. I can even decide what I am ordering before I get there by looking up their menu online. I can suggest we see a movie, American Sniper, afterward and look up the movie showtimes. I can get thousands of reviews for the movie and directions to the theater. But what happens when I try to Google the conflict in the middle east that is central to the plot of the movie. This is not something I would normally research, so Google "assumes" that I am looking for information about Middle Eastern countries. I get results like travel blogs, weather reports, photo blogs, along with a few news stories about recent events. Even when I add "Chris Kyle" the movie's character, I get movie reviews, book reviews, and People magazine articles about his wife and the Oscar buzz surround the movie and its director Clint Eastwood.  This doesn't just happen to me, this happens with our students too. Suppose they are researching the holocaust and our school search filters are set so as to remove any "offensive material," or google "assumes," based on their past searches, they are not looking for factual information about the events of WWII, but cartoon representations, or video games based on WWII. The student could easily end up with a very shallow research pool to choose from. Students are now used to the fast-paced research process that Google allows them, and seeing those results, will likely take what they can from the results, answer the question quickly and hand it in; not even thinking to look deeper, or to go beyond Google. So what can we do to encourage them to go beyond the "google hits."

The Future
We need to educate students to this phenomena. We need to show them other ways to search. We need to model using other search engines like clusty.com which allows them to quickly change direction and narrow searches by keywords from a word cloud. Or for the more visually motivated, we can use search engines like Quintura.com or search-cube.com. If they are still attached to Google we can teach them to use Google Scholar to expand their searches into the realm of authoritative, high-quality works that are useful for research purposes. There are so many more tools available, when students stop after a simple Google search, sure they may have answered the question posed by the teacher but they likely did not expand their understanding of the topic.

Education and research is about so much more than doing, exactly what the teacher asks and nothing more. It is about exploring and developing our own unique viewpoints. If you stop your research efforts with Google (which bases its results on your usual searches) then you will in all likelihood not be discovering alternate points of view. You will not be expanding your understanding of a topic and in short, you will always think how you've always thought. If the point of research is to go beyond our current understanding of a topic, we need to give students search alternatives, we need to teach them to go outside of the Google bubble!

How To:

• Homepage Links to alternate search sites
• Model searching through different sites 
• Explain filter bubbles 
• Show how different people get different results with identical keywords

Creating a culture of transfer in our schools

This week I have been thinking a lot about the concept of knowledge and skills transfer in school students, and how we, as librarians can help to facilitate a "culture of transfer" in our libraries, moreover, in our entire school.

I read an article this week by James Herring called Assumptions, Information Literacy and Transfer in High Schools. One line, in particular really caught my attention. He explains, and from my experience this seems exactly right, that "students...regard the school as a place where they do what teachers ask them to do, and more importantly, only do what teachers ask of them." I see this quite often. Student do not want go beyond the scope of the assignment instructions, they do not want to search for an answer in a text that isn't on a pre-provided list and they do not easily transfer information between one subject and the next without being told to do so.

Transfer is not an innate skill. In fact, as children our brains are pre-programmed to compartmentalize things. We build schemas for how to act in different situations. IE:quiet at the library but loud at a birthday party, raise my hand in school but not at home. It is only natural that this process continues as we grow. Students develop the mindset that the information they learn from the teacher during Social Studies class is only useful for them in Social Studies. Science is only useful for a science test, or paper, and wouldn't be helpful in a Language Arts or Math Class.

Transfer is a learned skill. It is something that needs to be facilitated in all classrooms, but we can start in the library. If we build our library curriculum around projects and subjects that the students are doing in their regular classrooms we can encourage the transfer of subject specific information to the library setting. If we involve their teachers in the lessons on information literacy we can, hopefully, encourage that skill beyond the library setting too.

Reinforcement is key. Just as with any skill, reinforcement is a huge part of fluency. If you don't practice, the skill becomes weaker and weaker until it is lost. Students need to have information literacy skills reinforced across their curriculum. We can help facilitate that by collaborating with teachers and helping them to understand what exactly information literacy means and why it is beneficial for them to incorporate...in short, why it needs to be part of their job too, and not just the librarians'. We can work with teachers across the grade level curriculum to create research projects that will encompass a variety of subject areas in order to facilitate transfer on multiple levels.

Transfer is a skill that needs to be taught and practiced and information literacy is a a skill that is worthless without the ability to transfer it to all situations. Through careful selection of projects and reinforcement of the skill cross-curriculum we can ensure that students develop the information literacy skill that they will need to be successful in all of their future academic endeavors.

Weblogs, Comments, & Wikis...Oh My!

I know that the use of blogging and wikis is becoming more commonplace in classrooms, but that doesn't help quell my apprehension about the new-to-me technologies. There are so many benefits to exposing students to these web tools, but even after all the research and reading I have done on it this week, I am left with more questions than answers.

Technology Access
I live in a very rural area, and believe it or not, there are still people who do not have internet access in their homes, either because of their location, or because of a poverty situation. If we incorporate something like blogging/wikis into our curriculum we need to set aside class time for students to contribute, otherwise, those without access to computers or internet at home would not benefit from the activity. We cannot just allow certain students to do the work in class because then we risk singling them out, and drawing attention to their home life, and we know how cruel children can be.

Chaos in an Organized World
I will be the first to admit it. I have a problem. I am hyper-organized. Yes, this might be an asset to a librarian, but it also means that wikis stress me out. To me, they seem like complete chaos. When I first started researching them it was through the lens of basic linear thought. I was thinking, how can the information stay organized if anyone can change it at will? How will I know where my words end and the students' begin? How will I keep track of who makes which changes? Will it take a ton of my already limited time to sort all of this out? I needed to take a step back and look at it from a different perspective. I am used to blogs and message boards which are organized so that each comment follows the one before in a very organized manner; all new posts and comments are dated and ordered and my Type A brain loves this. Wikis are different and I realize now that I cannot change them to suit my way of thinking, I need to change my way of thinking to understand wikis. There are ways to keep the wiki more organized, like assigning each student a color to write in, or having them "sign" their name after each change, but it will never be like a blog. However, that doesn't mean that my students will not benefit from it. Wikis encourages collaboration, and a sense of community ownership and responsibility that blogs, while great in their own ways, simply cannot do. Providing students opportunity with both will help them to develop multiple skill areas and parts of the brain....just like I am doing by learning about them.

Vandalism on Class Blogs and Wikis
We all know that one student who just can't be trusted not to make mean, or "funny" comments during a class discussion. Usually its the same student who is opening up windows on the computer what they shouldn't be, or attempting to access blocked pages with inappropriate URLs. I don't have just one of these students. I've had dozens of them and they are a huge concern for me with a project like this. They are unpredictable. I simply do not know how they would respond to a project like a blog or wiki. It is possible they would feel a sense of control and choice because it belongs to them, or to the collective class. But it is equally probable that they will make inappropriate comments, or rude/hurtful comments about another students ideas and contributions. My main goal is to keep my the learning environment in my classroom as positive and invitational as possible, and without monitoring blogs/wikis 24/7. I am left uncertain how I can keep that positive environment, especially when the wiki is open to the whole internet. Yes, I understand that I can always remove the offending comment or revert to a previous version of the wiki, but in order to keep the wiki environment the way I'd like, I would have to do that before students see any offensive material, and I don't know how to do that easily.

Examples of How Teachers are Using Wikis
Mrs. Cassidy's students wanted to know what 1000 looks like, so they collected 1000 names by posting a wiki.
Mrs. Anderson uses her wiki to keep student portfolios, communicate with parents, and post media content for students.
Mr. Driscoll used his wiki to host a student led debate about climate change for 10th, 11th & 12th graders.

These are just a few of the many wikis I looked at that helped me to decide that wikis are definitely worth learning and incorporating into our classroom, even though I still have a lot to learn about them.

Do you use a wiki in your classroom or library? I would love to see how you use them! Feel free to link in the comments. 

Assistive Technology in the Library: An Idealist Point of View

Teaching students with disabilities. I will be the first to admit that I am under-informed on this topic. I have worked with students with disabilities in a number of different capacities and I consider myself very knowledgeable about different conditions and the modifications that students might need, however, when it comes to assistive technology, I am admittedly a novice.

The district where I currently work is very small. There are between 50-80 students in each grade and very few with serious disabilities. We do have a number of students with learning disabilities. But off hand I can only think of maybe 3 with mobility impairments and 1 with a hearing impairment. It seems were are not very diverse when it comes to students with disabilities. That said, I do not plan to be in this district forever, and I enjoy learning and experimenting with the many new assistive technologies that exist.

I would love to someday look around in my library and see students using a variety of assistive technologies. There are many that could be useful to the normally functioning students as well as the students with disabilities. For example, spellcheckers and brainstorming/mindmapping software which are recommended for students with learning disabilities are actually useful for all students, and especially in helping students with special needs interact and work cooperatively with regular education students. Take bubbl.us as an example. This is a tool that would be very useful for students of all abilities for help in mapping out their ideas for research, pre-writing and group projects. Below is their brief explanatory video of the service bubbl.us provides.

But assistive technologies encompass more than just helpful web tools. I would love someday look around this imaginary library and see students taking advantage of headsets and screen readers, screen magnifying software, word prediction software, speech to text software, and even braille output devices.  I would love to see all of my students able to navigate the library technology and stacks independently, without needing to ask for help reaching a book from their wheelchair, or reading a sign that isn't labeled in large print or braille. Being able to do things independently creates a feeling of success in the classroom library, and the most important thing at the end of the day, is that our students feel successful no matter what their ability level.