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Lower or Higher?

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I’ve been out on holidays for a few weeks. A family trip as far west as Seattle, Victoria and Tofino. With kids. And a camper. If you’ve ever done it, you know what I mean…..

As I ease back in to my digital life, I’ve been spending some time in svbtle, the invite – only blogging network. An interesting quote out of here this AM that is one that we need to consider in education:

“Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced.”

Very true.

As educators, where do we fall on this? How does this work in your classroom? How do kids share information and resources that they find? How do you work with your kids to raise the quality of what they produce? Its not an either / or dichotomy. Its both.

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Information Epidemics, Learning and the Attention Economy

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Kids have a lot going on in their lives.

Sports, family, jobs, friends, facebook, and occasionally… school.

They have information being directed at them from all angles. Parents give instructions and schedules, volleyball coaches direct them to Youtube videos to help them improve their spiking techniques, an english teacher wants them to dig into a Shakespeare play and their phones endlessly buzz with vital texts coming in from friends.

They (as do most of us) live in a complex, information rich environment. The concept of the information and attention economies is something that many of us as teachers don’t often take into account, but which probably plays a central role in learning these days. How do the lessons and the experiences that we provide for our students fit into the information environment they encounter everyday? How does what we want them to learn compete for their limited amount of attention?

A new study published in Nature is the first of its kind showing how memes change, grow and spread in active information environments. While information has often been compared to a virus, this study actually shows that:

“This appears as an arresting conclusion that makes information epidemics quite different from the basic modeling and conceptual framework of biological epidemics. While the intrinsic features of viruses and their adaptation to hosts are extremely relevant in determining the winning strains, in the information world the limited time and attention of human behavior are sufficient to generate a complex information landscape and define a wide range of different meme spreading patterns.”

Lessons that are purely focused on information, that have little context or emotional attachment for students stand little chance of being retained or absorbed as meaningful by the students that we teach. While I have no expectation that every English lesson I teach will go viral, I do need to understand the complex information environments that my students live within. Does having them reflect on their personal information environments help them to place academic information in a context of some sort? How can we structure our classes, lessons and information so that students respond to it emotionally, moving it up in their limited amount of attention?

New questions to ponder…..

 

Related posts:

Attention Economy The Global Attention Economy and the Classroom The Attention Crash Validating Information

Revisiting Wikipedia

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I make no secret of the fact that I love Wikipedia both personally and professionally. I use it a lot for myself when I am looking for quick information on something. I also send the kids in my class to Wikipedia. The caution I give them is that Wikipedia should be a first source of information to get a solid overview on something and not a last resort.

I know there is (still….) a great debate among many teachers about the worth of it, but I need to tell you, in the rest of society, the debate is over. Wikipedia proves its worth to tens of thousands of people every single day. As with any web based resource, we need to teach our students to be wise consumers and producers of information, but the value and power of this resource cannot be denied.

I think that in education, we are often concerned with providing our students with information that has stood the test of time. We want our students to only have access to the best information; anything less, anything that is questionable or possibly malleable, is frowned upon.

Is this right?

When we live in a society that is changing so quickly, I believe that information that is good enough for here, for now, for our purposes is completely valid.

Besides, as Jimmy Wales stated on twitter this AM, your perspective on wikipedia may all depend on the field that you work in:

 

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Wikipedia: The Easy Link Curriculum and Wikipedia Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Brtiannica What Knowledge?

Liquid Information

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These two short videos from flickr show the flow of information on twitter in and out of Japan directly around the time of the tragic earthquake and tsunami that took place on March 11th:

Information is a liquid. It flows and ebbs. It has it’s busy places filled with rapids and large flows. It has it’s quiet backwaters and slow spaces.

I don’t believe information can be “managed.” (and I also believe that’s a good thing. Tools that promise us the ability to manage information are most likely censorship tools).

Information that flows is fresh and flushed out. In spaces where information does not flow, it quickly becomes stagnant.

While classrooms collaborate globally for different projects and units, I don’t think anyone has managed in a school setting to create a long term global network of learners. That means that with all that we’ve done, we still haven’t managed to really take advantage of these tools with our learners.

Information in classrooms might trickle, but it doesn’t flow like it does in authentic global spaces.

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Information Ecosystem Neatly Packaged Information A New Language Compartmentalizing Information

Is it Real?

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This week I gave the students in my class the task of deciding if two websites were real or not.

Building on earlier work of reading the Junk Detector piece I had written and evaluating websites for design, I gave them two websites, Air Asia and Dog Island and asked them to work through a process of deciding if these sites were real or not.

It was interesting listening to the self talk of the students, the questions they were asking and their comments about these sites; both of which they knew nothing about. I gave them this worksheet (pdf) as a scaffold to help them test out some of the strategies talked about in the Junk Detector piece.

For example when they talked about Air Asia, they asked questions like: are these cities real? Can I pretend to book a flight? What are the restrictions about where, when and who can fly? How much money are these flights worth in Canadian dollars (as they then open a new tab and head to a currency convertor). What do the sites linking back to Air Asia teach me about them?

In the end, most of the students made the right decisions about these places. Most of them decided that Air Asia is real and Dog Island isn’t. It was an interesting process and it was great to see the evaluation skills that my students have move on to a higher level.

Please take, use, and modify these resources as you wish.

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Neatly Packaged Information

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I’ve long had difficulty teaching out of any kind of basal reading system. Right from the beginning of my career I had trouble seeing how these sets of readers were supposed to inspire, motivate or interest students in reading or the world.

Luckily, along the way, I’ve had administrators who supported me as I worked with the students in my classroom in a variety of ways, pulling out the textbooks when I wanted a common text for us to look at, but otherwise, leaving them on the shelf.

This same philosophy applies when it comes to information and and research. Publishing companies want to sell solutions. They want to sell pre packaged units and collections of books. They want to sell search access, collections of pre approved websites and libraries of online videos that have been watched by “experts.” They want to give teachers scripts, assessments, worksheets and tables of outcomes.

Information that is neatly and cleanly packaged usually promotes only one point of view. Sets of books and websites and videos don’t often help us to wonder, “who’s voice am I not hearing in this?” Purchasing unit after unit of stuff doesn’t give our students the ability to locate their own information, to evaluate it and share it with the class or a network of learners.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against buying resources to use in your classroom. Without them we have to reinvent the wheel and start over every single time we teach something. But consider these resources to be a starting point. Ask your students what points of view they are missing, whose voices they are hearing and whose they are not. Ask them to be critical readers and evaluate for bias. Help them to gain the skills they need to locate their own information and share it with others.

Having skills like these will help our students to be cautious, independent consumers of information with a global outlook.

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Information Sources Whose Information Counts? Information Quality Control Verifying Information Online

Truth from Fiction

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A few weeks ago I embedded a video on here that had been made by Howard Rheingold. Called Crap Detection 101, this 20 minute video is a great look at evaluating information that we find online. If you haven’t taken the time to watch it, you really need to.

This got me thinking about students and helping them learn to evaluate information.

I decided to write.

In the end I’ve produced a five page piece that is meant to be given to students as a first step in teaching them to evaluate information they find online. It is meant for a middle years audience, but can probably be used by kids a few years older if needed.

I’d appreciate any feedback on this or suggestions for revisions or editing. Please leave ideas in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. Alternatively, I’ve uploaded this document to Google docs. Feel free to take it, use it, make any changes to it that you wish.

Here it is in pdf as well:

truth from fiction

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Growing our Textbook

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Information is one of the main currencies of a 21st century education.

Who has control over it, where does it come from, who decides on using it and accessing it are some of the main questions that we need to think about as educators. Moving from a closed, government and teacher controlled loop to an international based, self controlled open source system is a vital movement that classrooms and schools need to go through. I believe that classrooms need to have control over the information ecosystem that they live within.

This is a process that we are working through in my classroom right now. At the beginning of the school year, as I teach the students in my grade seven and eight classroom about RSS, I give them an igoogle page populated with several feeds that I feel are important for them to read. I call this our textbook and have often called it required reading. I expect the students in my classroom to spend time throughout each week reading this page, writing blog posts that grow out of the content that is posted on it and hosting discussions in the classroom about what they have learned from this reading. This year’s igoogle page started out with text news feeds from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, New Scientist.com, Afrigadget and World Changing. As well, I also included podcast feeds from CBC ‘s Dispatches and BBC’s Documentaries. In considering what feeds to choose for my students, I look for information sources that I think my students will find interesting, that are constantly updated, global, environmentally sound and future focussed.

While later than usual simply because of the class I have this year, it is time that the students in my class take more control over the information sources they are working with using RSS. To do that, we have over the last several weeks worked through a multi step process.

1.) We first examined the the feeds that we have been working with this year to uncover some of the themes of these information sources. For example, we talked in class about such things as them being updated regularly, about them being global, environmentally focussed, etc. From this discussion emerged a set of criteria for evaluating sources.

2.) Following this, we then brainstormed a list of topics that they would be interested in getting more information about. Current events, environmental news, jobs, emerging technologies, science and engineering, and global issues were the topics they decided upon as a class.

3.) The next step was simply to surf. To spend a lot of time online over a few days looking for places that we can access information on these issues. Each student in the class chose one of these topics that they were interested in and we made huge lists on the classroom whiteboard of possible sites. This also led to a great extended discussion in class about choosing sites to list for the class. What makes something good? What makes a site a possibility? We came up with a list that included criteria such as current information, includes multimedia elements, that the information is truthful and that the site publishes an RSS feed.

4.) From the massive lists that emerged over several days, each student had to examine the list of possible sites for the topic they were interested in. For example, if a student was working in the topic category of environmental news, they had to examine and evaluate each of the sites that was listed as a possible information source. Each site had to be evaluated against the criteria that we had been talking about over the previous days. From this process, each student had to be ready to head into small group discussions with several sites they had chosen off the class generated lists as being worthwhile to subscribe to.

5.) Next was the small group discussions. The group of students focussed on each topic met (most of them contained 5 – 6 students) and talked about the sites they thought were the most valuable that had been found. They had to defend their personal choices and come to a consensus. At the end of this discussion, each group posted on the whiteboard one or two sites which they felt were valuable and worthwhile for everyone in the class to subscribe to and read. They had to defend and explain their choice to the class. As a side note, one group came out of their discussion with the choice that no site in their category should be added as they felt they were unable to find one that was valuable. I thought this was legitimate and had no problem with this decision.

6.) Finally, everyone in the class added the feeds that we chosen by each group to their igoogle page.

A different process then me simply giving kids information or telling them to open to page X in a textbook; but one that I feel is far more valuable.

Photo Credit: Search the Light: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doolittle1989/2062571275/sizes/m/

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Is Sticking it out a Good Thing?

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I’ve been noticing something in my class and I’m wondering if it is common.

Students in my class who struggle with searching for information seem to stick with one strategy each time they are asked to find something online. For example, if a student is searching in videos or images, or even doing a regular, text based web search, even if they do not locate the information they need, they are very difficult to move on from the unsuccessful strategy. They want to continue doing what they are doing, even if it is not working out for them.

This might be for several reasons:

1.) They may not want to switch out of video or image based searching because they are reluctant readers and at least staying with video or images does not require them to read.

2.) They may not have any more than one search strategy, therefore, even though they are being unsuccessful, they don’t have anything else to try.

I’ve been seeing this a few times lately in my class and have discussed it with my students but they don’t seem to have any answers. Do you find this as well? Is this common with students that you work with?

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The Death of Tilde?

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Spending a lot of time lately with students talking about the similarities and differences of various kinds of texts. Novels, textbooks, and online texts have been the main focus of our discussions.

One thing that has grown out of this is talking about telling truth from fiction online. How do you tell if something is true that you read online?

One of the things that we used to tell students to be aware of was the tilde. Remember the tilde? The tilde is the symbol on your keyboard that looks like this “~.” It shows up in URLs like this:

Now this particular tilde belongs to Maurice Hollingsworth, a professor in the eduction faculty at the University of Lethbridge who I have been lucky enough over the past several years to spend some with online, exchanging emails and learning with. But when I began to think about web sites and addresses, I wondered about how common tildes are now.

A tilde was originally used on the web as a symbol to denote that while the website you are looking at might be affiliated with a certain institution, the particular page you are viewing is the personal site of a single person. Therefore, the information contained on the site should be treated with caution as it may contain information that is personal opinion.

One of the myriad of skills that we taught kids to validate information online.

The issue is simply that I am not certain how valid the skills is anymore. With the growth of thousands of web 2.0 sites which allow people to post information at little or not cost, the need for institutions to provide what used to be valuable web space for their employees has plummeted.

Are there websites out there which have tildes in them? Certainly. By the thousands. Is understanding what tildes are, and what they mean for validating information on websites important? Mildly. I think it is rapidly turning into more of a legacy skill. Kind of like how we still teach kids how to multiply fractions and what the capital city of Angola is….

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