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March 15, 2003
WEB LITERACY and Critical Thinking: A Teacher's Tool Kit
By Judy Salpeter
This practical guide offers classroom activities and exercises that train your students to be discerning consumers of information on the Internet.
Call it information overload, data smog, infoglut, data dyspepsia—whatever term we use for it, everybody is talking, these days, about the overwhelming proliferation of Web sites, e-mail messages, and other digital information that bombards us on a daily basis. On the positive side, this means our students have access to a huge array of valuable information—primary resources, up-to-the-minute news, and networking opportunities they never would have had before the Internet age. But sending young people out into these uncharted waters without understanding what Alan November refers to as "the grammar of the Internet" can be dangerous indeed.
In recent issues of Technology & Learning (See Net-Wise Teens: Safety, Ethics, and Innovation by Amy Poftak; The Educator's Guide to Copyright and Fair Use by Hall Davidson; and Teaching Kids To Be Web Literate by Alan November) we have addressed a number of these dangers—ones related to safety, ethics, and legality. But, as November points out, it is equally unsafe to send students out on the Web without the ability to validate the information they find. The Internet grammar he proposes teaching them includes "a range of critical thinking strategies, from decoding Web addresses to understanding the pattern of links to searching for the owner of a site."
David Warlick of the Landmark Project agrees, explaining that these sorts of skills are key to "preparing kids for a future that we cannot clearly describe. The best thing to teach them, today, is how to teach themselves." He refers to the American Library Association's Nine Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning as "learning literacies"—essential skills that "help people learn in an information-rich, highly networked, and rapidly changing world."
But how do we teach such things? In the next few pages we look at numerous activities and suggestions that help young people learn how to locate, analyze, synthesize, and critique information.
Searching Skills
HOW TO
You might begin with an agreed-upon search engine and a short list of factual questions (e.g., When was President Bush born? What is the typical number of babies in a litter of leopard cubs? What is the capital of Uganda?). Which key words do the students think will get them to the answer most efficiently? Working in groups, away from the computer, they can write, critique, and revise their search strings.
Online, it's time to test the results. Which team is able to locate the answer with the fewest mouse clicks? Who managed to find a search string that resulted in fewer than 10 matches? The Google search engine offers a fun option that can be used for self-testing: the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button takes searchers to a single site that closely matches their search string. If the "I'm Feeling Lucky" hit answers the relevant question, students can feel proud of the keywords they chose.
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The ability to search for information online is one of the most basic digital literacy skills. How do you sift through billions of pages of information in order to find the gems?
A search engine is not always where you want to start. Dr. Merle Marsh, director of special projects for Worcester Preparatory School in Berlin, Md., worries that teachers far too often send students off to "search the Internet for..." when they would be better off steering them to a preselected list of sites. Her favorites include Franklin Institute's Educational Hotlists and the links at Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators.
Providing such prescreened choices is important for younger students—and even for older learners when the goal is to steer them to high-quality content quickly. But, even then, search skills come into play. For example, with Yahooligans, NetTrekker, KidsClick, or AOL@SCHOOL, the number of preselected sites is large enough that an understanding of directory structure and the use of keywords to conduct searches becomes important. And when the time does come to send students out onto the wider Web, guidance on the search process becomes essential.
There are lots of tutorials online that focus on the basics—Boolean searching, the use of keywords, and the differences between directories and standard search engines. Increasingly, you can find articles on second-generation search tools such as Vivisimo or Guidebeam and ways of searching the "Deep Web" for data contained within databases not accessed by the standard search engines. We link to some of these tutorials in the online version of this article, and others can be found at the search sites themselves.
How Many Hits?
"When we hear 'Wow, I got 1,000 hits!' we know we have not met our responsibility to our students," says Dr. Marianne Handler, professor at National-Louis University. Experimenting with and discussing Web search techniques helps students discover that the true challenge is to get just a few hits. One can make a game out of this challenge, with a variety of playful races designed to hone fact-finding skills.
As your students work on refining their search skills, take the opportunity to discuss what they have learned. Can they come up with a list of tips for other students trying to narrow in on information quickly? What suggestions - from tutorials, teachers, peers, or elsewhere - were most helpful to them?
Scavenger/Treasure Hunts
HOW TO
You can challenge students to test out some of the search options for themselves, building charts of their own. Assign each student or group of students two search tools to compare, and have the class agree upon some test questions and search approaches to use in their testing. Discuss what criteria they will use to measure the effectiveness of the tools. What, besides the number of search results, might capture the value of the tool and its relevance to them? For example, students might decide that, when using the same search string with different engines, the test for school purposes is how many of the top 10 search results seem relevant to the question at hand.
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If your students are having fun with the homegrown search challenges above, they will undoubtedly enjoy some of the scavenger and treasure hunts that abound on the Net. Although these activities offer far less in the problem-solving realm than the popular WebQuests described later, they do offer a motivating way of practicing basic fact-finding skills.
Many of the treasure hunts you will find on the Web actually give you the site or sites to visit; in those cases, the "searching" is within the site—basically, skimming for information. This is helpful for developing reading and research skills and gathering background information for a new unit of study. Even more powerful, if you want students to practice search skills at the same time, is to have them create their own treasure hunts.
Here are some interesting hunts and links to others, along with suggested tools for creating your own.
Which Search Engine?
Most of us have our favorite search tools, and Handler suggests that, if you don't have a single mandated search interface for your district, it is wise to direct students to one or two search tools of your choosing. On the other hand, the process of comparing search options and narrowing in on their own favorites can be a good learning experience for older students.
You can start off by observing some of the findings at a site such as Search Engine Watch, which offers elaborate lists and charts with information on the popularity, size, speed and search approach used by a variety of search engines. What are the most popular search tools of the day? What new tools are worth checking out?
NEXT: Problem Solving and Applying
Who's Behind the Curtain?
Fact or Fabrication?
Putting It All Together
Judy Salpeter, an experienced educator, freelance writer, and education technology specialist, is program chair for Technology & Learning Events and consulting editor for Technology & Learning magazine.
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