Helping students take control of their own learning is one of the most important challenges facing teachers. The (inquiry or constructivist) approach is based on providing students with opportunities to formulate their own research and create “artifacts” or “products” that demonstrate their understanding and skill development. However, it often becomes glaringly obvious that “research” to many students involves taking the information from the first couple of web sites that appear from a google search, cobbling it together and “voila” – there it is. This is a long way from the goal of students as knowledge “producers”. Teaching students how to evaluate the reliability of information remains one of the most important literacy skills.
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site is useful to show just how easily students can be manipulated by a professional “looking” web site.
This AfterEd video (Teachers’ College, Columbia University) discusses the importance of providing students with “educated guidance on how to use new media” and helps debunk the assumption that buying lots of computer hardware will meet students’ 21st century literacy needs.
Some key “critical literacy” questions it advocates include:
How was this text contructed?
What are its underlying values?
What are the conventions it uses?
Who is the intended audience?
Who owns and who benefits from this?
Video via: Multiliteracies
This Department of Education Tasmania site also has activities and work samples
Hi Cindy,
I have been discussing this with our high school English teachers as we are in the midst of a construction project that will restrict our access to print sources for research over the next three years. Our reliance on web research and the ability of students to interrogate their online sources for validity will be tantamount to our success in this endeavor. I’ve pulled this post into my diigo account to use as a unit in a class I am creating in that department.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for your comment. We are in the second year of our adoption of a 1:1 laptop program so most students rely on web-based resources to conduct research. Helping them develop the ability to be discerning readers/researchers is a vital skill. It’s not a new skill by any means but given that anyone can now publish material online, I think it’s more important than ever.
I’ve written here about how important it is that we, as teachers,adequately prepare students so they are able to recognise “misinformation” when it, inevitably, appears. The martinlutherking.org site is a prime example of this, written by a former KKK member to discredit and defame King as an “anti-America communist” using dubious, anti-civil rights government documents to present a revisionist, racist version of history.
You have raised some interesting points here which has challenged my own thinking since this post:
http://educatingthedragon.edublogs.org/2007/10/30/look-out-mrs-omalley-detour-ahead/
Students need the freedom to explore their own learning and what we, as educators need to provide is the skill set to enable them to truely deepen and widen their own understandings.