Not So Distant Future

As I have been doing some reading all summer, my whole notion of research is shifting somewhat.  Maybe it is reflecting the shift that many of our students are living, as well.

I’m coming to realize more and more that although in schools we treat research as a somewhat solitary activity, in its true form, research is a very networked activity.

As George Siemens writes, in describing Connectivism, “learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity.”  He goes on to point out that learners “remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.”   I often think of how scientists or historians conduct research, not in an isolated bubble, but in a network of colleagues, acquaintances, librarians and in the company of information from the past. 

Siemens goes on to cite Karen Stephenson, who writes:

“Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge.”

Our students already practice the power of knowledge sharing because they use their social networks not only socially, but in order to help one another….in the olden days, via long phone calls about homework, and now via Facebook or MySpace or IM.  But do we ask them to employ those skills DURING the school day, officially, particularly when they are engaged in a research project?

As I read more and think about research projects, and then think about how my own approach to learning has changed the last few years with the increasing ability to network both within and outside of my campus, I am realizing that we need to be addressing those changes in library research programs as well.

What ways can we  support students in drawing on the knowledge of both experts and of one another?

Some practical ideas I am considering that would allow students to network more:

• Using message boards or forums during research projects so that students can give one another research tips is a way to engage students more actively.  We tried this last year during our Vietnam Wall project and it worked well.  Students enjoyed giving tips to one another.
• Creating collaborative wikis for projects is another way.  Again, we tried this on a government policy project, where students collaborated across class periods on a wiki.

• Asking a student to explain to the class how they would approach a research problem establishes that students have expertise as well (a fact they already realize, since students often ask other students for help.)
• Asking students to “play” librarian for a class and explain how to use the appropriate databases.
• Enabling some sort of “chat” during a research period that could be used for research help from one another.

• Making sure that students spent time conferencing face to face with one another every couple of days to share good resources with each other (ala the Cha-cha website model).
• Employing a “team” of researchers–assign a research project to a team, much as a team of scientists would work on a research dilemma.  Allow the teams to conference with other “teams” from other class periods, via blogs, wikis, Skype chats, chatrooms, or face-to-face meetings.
• Posting white butcher paper on the wall where students can write requests for help on a topic and others can volunteer to assist them or write suggestions.  (It doesn’t always have to be “high tech.”)

• Helping students set up a Pageflakes site with feeds from helpful blogs and links to helpful websites to “display” their learning network.
• Having students use web-mapping software like Inspiration or Bubbl.us to map out who their information “lifelines” are.
• Teaching them how to use the del.icio.us bookmarks of other experts or their friends as a way to broaden their network and find good information.
• Asking them to show you how they use social networking to help them with research–What are the sites they use to share information and help one another?

By redefining research in a more “real world” and connected way, I think we can help it become more integral to our campuses and more integral to the way our students learn.  

I’d like to hear of other ideas you may have for helping students “network” during a research process.  Thanks to Dean Shareski for the links.

A few days ago, I wrote about reflective learning, and really identified with Will Richardson’s and David Warlick’s comments about focusing on the learning and community, and how the process sometimes gets lost in the production of the product.  

Ironically, as I was reading Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix last night, I noticed that Harry has difficulty in Snape’s Potions class.  Frequently his “product” doesn’t meet Snape’s expectations.   After some discussion with Hermione and reflection, Harry realizes that he needs to slow down and focus on the process more.

Now that may be a simple analogy that doesn’t entirely fit, but the point is, that many research models that we use support this focus on process and self-evaluation, (such as the Big 6, or Carol Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process, and many others).

Carol Kuhlthau  work particularly focuses on the process, students’ emotional stages as they move through it, and how we can support them during the process, by identifying when the most opportune times for intervention are, and what those types of interventions could look like.

As teachers and librarians, how can we provide more time for reflection and focus on the process and the learning?  But particularly, how can we do that in a way that builds a supportive community of learners that Will Richardson writes about?

Where I see the breakdown occurring is in several areas:

1.  Do we have expectations?  –The students may not be required to spend time on the research/reflection part of the assignment prior to the production part.   Kids are in a hurry(and so are we sometimes).  I’ve seen students starting their powerpoint on the same day they are doing the research assignment.  Where is the time for them to absorb what they are learning? Is the assignment so fact-based that all they are doing is regurgitating information?

2.  Do they have enough time for reflection during the process and afterwards?  In our haste to cover so much content, are we neglecting the time to reflect?   Can the research be spread out over several weeks or over the semester to create time for more deep inquiry?   (This would model authentic research–which isn’t completed in a couple of days or a week.)

3.  Do we ask students to evaluate the process?  The product gets evaluated in many different ways.   How can we help them be more reflective as they are doing research and share that reflection with other learners who are having similar experiences as a means of extending their reflection and gaining support?

4.  Do we help them build a network for discussing the process and extending their learning?   Or are they working in isolation?    Do real scientists and researchers work in isolation?  Do we?  How does helping students build a network help create a more authentic experience?

4.  Is our goal even to teach that reflection?  Should we?  What is our goal?  Product, process, learning?  Is the focus of the assignment actually reflective of what the goal is?

Some concrete ideas for focusing on process–

1.  a research process log or questionaire (And some other examples I’ve linked to).  These could be used at the end of a research period, weekly, or throughout the stages of the process.   One question I am pondering is how to make these types of questionaires more networked–post on a wiki? or blog?  Other ideas?

2.  a research blog –A place where students can write reflectively about their process, and dialogue with others in their class.

•  If it seems too overwhelming to have each student create a blog, use a group blog and have a scribe for the week or day. 
• Or  threaded forum may work better, where students can toss out topics they need help with and get feedback.
• What about podblogs?–Group the students in the class into pods or groups.   Each group collaboratively writes a blog as they move through a learning process.  That way, the teacher is only checking in with four or five blogs per class instead of 30, and the group can interact and form community and share tips and help during the research process.    The 6 or 7 members of each pod can alternately post to the blog.

3.  Wikis–use wikis for students so they can collaborate as they collect information.   We have done this and it worked well.    Students across class periods working on the same topic were able to help each other gather the research.  (This would work best when there are a set of topics that all the classes are working on.)   As Will Richardson points out, Wikis have a much neglected but interactive discussion feature.  Pbwiki even incorporates chat features and yackpack, which allows recorded conversations to be sent back and forth.  How could those types of discussion tools be used along with a research wiki to stimulate discussion of the learning that was occurring?

4.  Google Docs–encourage students to use Google docs as they take notes or begin writing, and have them invite a few of their fellow students to join in as collaborators or just as readers.

5.  Sharing bookmarks–another route other than wikis is to have students set up accounts on del.icio.us or Furl or Google Notebook, because these tools not only allow students to bookmark their findings, but to share their bookmarks with other students.  Diigo not only allows students to bookmark their sites, but annotate them, clip them, and share them on a blog, email, or album.   Bookmarking a collection of sites that they can use later conveys the idea that the learning is ongoing, that they can “add to” what they have found later, in a way that a set of notecards or a bibliography doesn’t, because they seem more “final” and product oriented.   And these sites allow them to network and learn collaboratively from one another.

6.  Evaluation–As librarian extraordinaire Doug Johnson reminded me in an previous post,

“One of the things I’ve noticed is that when we ask students to follow an information problem solving model like the Big6, we tend to ignore the 1st step of defining the task and the last step of evaluating the product and the process. “It’s the final step where we need to ask students to reflect on both how good their product was AND how effective they were in doing their work. I’d ask students to always answer the question ‘What will I do differently next time to improve my work and skills?’”

Even if we ask students to reflect on the process along the way, asking them to reflect at the “end of the journey” or to try to pull their thoughts together after the process is important.   And having them do that in a way that is networked(like a blog or wiki discussion or a chat on Skype, or a classroom discussion, etc.) allows them to learn from one another, and build on one another’s evaluation and learning. 

That is where we are really having them extend their learning, deepen their reflection, and internalize their own learning process.

Other ideas, thoughts?  This potion I’m working on is not fully baked yet

When grading a stack of student papers, Jacqueline Hicks Grazette, a teacher at St. Albans High School in the D.C. area,  recently noticed that a student used Wikipedia to answer a question, and had made a note of it on his paper.   

That, among other things, led her to write this opinion column in the Washington Post this morning, Wikiality in my Classroom, where she realistically outlines the collision of Wikipedia, Google, online ethics, student stress and web 2.0 tools and the dilemmas teachers face.

“In the online world in which teachers and students navigate, ambiguity. . .
is daily fare. For young people who have grown up with instant access to information, it seems like no big deal. But to educators, trained in accurate sourcing and correct attribution, deciding what the limits should be often poses a dilemma.”

As a student in the article comments:

“We are part of a networked society. . .Your world is different from ours. We are taught to share information and collaborate. We do it all the time. No one really cares where it came from.”

A collaborative world

The student’s comment perfectly highlights the tension between the online culture of sharing and the rigors of academic scholarship, as Grazette highlights. She points to Princeton’s Academic Integrity website which describes this.

The internet is bringing research issues into the forefront in ways that they never have been before, because “research” has become part of our daily lives, not a “once in awhile” project.

A comment from one student she interviews drives home the need for educators to take the time out of the rush towards testing and excellence to really discuss internet ethics with students.  They are already living in the “online” world in ways many of us are not fully, and will be living in this environment for years to come. 

Isn’t it our job to help prepare them for making good choices academically and ethically?   This is not to imply that many of us aren’t doing this–because we are–but how can we do it better across the curriculum?  

Change

I also wonder how is all this going to change our ideas of academic scholarship, copyright, etc?  The use of information has become such a grass-roots, democratic (little d) movement, that  it is going to drive change in all our systems, and maybe changes that will make information more accessible to all. 

Is MLA format really going to be the best way for tracking citations in the future, for example?  What about the Dewey Decimal system?  While both systems are capable of handling change and were designed in ways that can be flexible, on the other hand, is that linear way of thinking going by the wayside?

What questions does her article raise for you?

   dewey decimal signage–Seattle Public Library

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/getdown/114686279/

Rereading the Blog of Proximal Development that Will Richardson recommended and visiting other high schools has stirred up thoughts for me about how compartmentalized both high schools and many colleges are in terms of curriculum.

   As I said previously, one of the things that excited me the most during our site visits last week was seeing some interdisciplinary connections, because I think they reflect more accurately how we really learn.   While we all need the fundamental background in order to even know how to pursue an interest, we also cross over lines of the curriculum when we begin to research something.

In his post on his Blog of Proximal Development, Konrad Glogowski pointed out:

We need to give our students the freedom to learn and engage with ideas that they find relevant and important. I think it begins with stepping out of what Will today referred to as the “Comfort Zone of Content.” It begins, it seems to me, when the teacher becomes a learner and replaces the static curriculum documents with inquiry, conversation, knowledge-building, and personal networks.

As a librarian, the library(hopefully) is an optimal environment to see students doing that sort of inquiry and personal knowledge building, and to see the “lights go on” for many of them while they are pursuing their interests.

But my question is–how can we broaden the use of research across our entire curriculum, so that students see research as an integral part of the field of history or science or math, etc.?   Careers in almost every core subject are defined by constant learning and research and change, and research isn’t separated out into a “unit” but is part and parcel of how people in these fields work. 

The internet has created an environment where following up on information becomes a more spontaneous process.   But do we even have enough computers in each classroom to really allow students to get online and in the moment, find what they are curious about?

The other integrative aspect of making research opportunities a natural part of the curriculum is that it crosses over curricular lines and classroom walls–students may begin pursuing an interest in science and invariably end up crossing into math or possibly art or history.   Students may begin studying a novel, as we often do here, and end up crossing over into history and art.   The connections are real and waiting to be discovered.

So, my question of the day is–how do we already embed research into our curriculum, and are there courses and places where we can do a better job at making inquiry and personal ”knowledge building”  a living and breathing part of how we teach our courses?  And how can I better support that across the school?  What tools do we need to help with this?

In our Project Technology workshop this week, we shared how to use Photostory (free from Microsoft), and shared a project that our English 3 AP classes are doing relating to the book The Things They Carried. 

The project was initiated by the English 3AP teachers a few years ago.  Students are given a name from the Vietnam Memorial Wall, and are asked to find information about the individual .  This year in order to create projects that could be shared outside the campus and have more of an authentic audience, students were asked to create a Photostory, Microsoft Producer Project, iMovie, digital movie or Powerpoint about the individual(although we were trying to move most students away from traditional uses of Powerpoint).  

Joel (our computer coordinator) and I created a wiki with directions for the different software students could use and did a presentation for all 15 classes involved.    We tried to emphasize the visual part of the presentation and presentation “zen” since sometimes students overemphasize text and special effects in powerpoint, to the neglect of the visual elegance of their design.  Since these are real people, we wanted to emphasize the appropriateness of the music, tone, and presentation.

Ultimately, each student will post their project on the wiki  so that it will be an online tribute to the soldiers.  So the audience for this project is very real.

Students seemed mostly thrilled to be moving away from powerpoint, and particularly for this project, having “bullet points” fly in about an individual’s life seemed somehow not fitting.

The research part of the project posed some difficulty for the students, because some soldiers had quite a bit of information posted about them online, and some did not.  Students had to be resourceful and learn how to dig for information in local museums, on military history sites, on sites about Vietnam, etc.

So that we would understand what students were experiencing, the teachers, Joel, and I, took a name as well and created a presentation that we shared with the students.  The soldier I selected is Lesley Ayers.  (To see the presentation full screen, right click on the image when it plays and select “full screen.)

ayersfinalfin.wmv

I’ve already decided I want to edit mine and tell the story in a different way, so I’m going to keep working on it.  We’ll keep you posted on the project and the students’ results!  For more links to the software used, check out the sidebar on the Vietnam wiki.

  Home for yet another ice day, so I am catching up on my reading!

Another item in the Columbia Journalism review article I mentioned yesterday struck me as interesting for research. 

As one effort to change the Times-Herald paper, “When (editor)Levine took over, his paper began a ’sourcing project,’ designed to force reporters to avoid ‘going to the same three or four sources [for] every story.’ More and more diverse sources, the theory goes, should improve story ideas and stories, and help reporters know more when they say what they know.”

How would we change and deepen our students’ research skills(or our own) if we widened our circle of sources that we used to get information or required them to vary theirs? 

So here are a few ideas:

Have students use foreign newspapers.  Our LexisNexis database includes a whole section of international newspapers, as does our Nettrekker database(password required for both).   BBC News site offers a western, but more European approach to events in the news.

Have students try a different search site(other than Google) to see what results they find.  For example, they could try Clusty or Exalead.

Require that students find the name of an expert in the field they are researching and describe the expertise of that individual.

Require that students find an independent source to retrieve statistics related to their topic–that is, a source outside of an article they are using.  Again, the LexisNexis database or U.S. Census Bureau are good starting places for statistics, as is Infoplease.com, which has a good overview of world statistics.

Require that students conduct an interview with a person with expertise in that area, either in person, by email, instant message, Skype(an online phone service), on a discussion board, etc.

Any of these methods could help students develop the habit of “deeper” searching and lead to a deeper understanding of their subject.

Then students truly could display the “five I’s” that Mitchell Stephens mentions at the end of his article–by being informed, intelligent, interesting, industrious, and insightful, skills they can carry forward with them.

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Mitchell Stephens writes a fascinating analysis of how the availability and immediacy of news on the web is changing mainstream newspapers.  It strikes me that many of his findings have implications for our teaching and our students.

“News now not only arrives astoundingly fast from an astounding number of directions, it arrives free of charge. . . . But the extra value our quality news organizations can and must regularly add is analysis: thoughtful, incisive attempts to divine the significance of events — insights, not just information. What is required — if journalism is to move beyond selling cheap, widely available, staler-than-your-muffin news — is, to choose a not very journalistic-sounding word, wisdom. ” (emphasis mine)

As students become more able to educate themselves via the web, long-distance learning, networking, etc., it seems to me that this analysis and wisdom is the added value that we as teachers contribute.

The article goes on to quote Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent(U.K.): ““The idea that a newspaper is going to be peoples’ first port of call to find out what’s going on in the world is simply no longer valid. So you have to add another layer: analysis, interpretation, point of view.”

Mike Levine, editor of the Times Herald-Record(Middletown, N.Y.), comments: “We’re not the infantry anymore. . . .We don’t just go out to board meetings and take dictation. That’s not really much of a contribution to the community. What are needed are journalists who can connect the dots.” (emphasis mine)

When we ask students to do research, write a paper, or do homework, are we asking them to “connect the dots” or simply rehash what is already known?  Are we really understanding that they can “find” the five W’s online in a matter of minutes, and are we asking them to analyze and ask why?  

I don’t want to generalize because I know many times students are asked to probe more deeply, and I do know the projects students really respond to ask them to do this, but in this changing environment, are we asking students to do this often enough?

It requires a focus on our part on what we want students to achieve from any given research assignment and what good practices we want them to walk away with from the experience. 

So many web 2.0 tools allow us to help students connect the dots and be more reflective about their experiences.   When students create a wiki about their research, or blog with students from another campus about a project, or create a video about a research assignment that they post on Google video for comments–all of these are ways they can synthesize, reflect and connect the dots.  

Ideas or comments?   Part two of my reflections on this article later….

David Warlick  tells a story of a job he used to do at a factory which has now been replaced with a computer.

One thing that has happened to information, that should be impacting what and how we teach, is that information has become the raw material with which people work.  We mine it, we work it, fashioning it into an information product that will be valuable to other people, and then express it in some compelling way.  It may be a story, a report, a song, or a design.  It may be a piece of computer code, or a sales pitch for a new marketing or distribution technique….

We still teach too much as if information is the end product.  We teach it, you learn it, we test it.  Instead, we need to present information as a raw material.  You access it, and then you do something with it, that adds value in some way.  You construct your own knowledge.

His comments remind me of a commentary in Edweek(which is free this week!)on the concept of flow, which one of our teachers, Bill Martin, introduced to me.   Edweek describes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept as:

The psychological process that describes how people balance skill, interest, and challenge.  Flow explains how the mind rises to challenges—how people can become “lost” in an activity that fully engages them.

The article goes on to say that the types of activities that seem to create flow for students are interdisciplinary opportunities, extracurriculars, and I would add, research projects.

When I think of research projects that really engage students, they create a situation where the student is considering the topic outside of the class period–they are looking for connections in their daily lives, and really using that “raw data” that David Warlick was talking about as a way to make connections and make their learning personal, rather than rehashing  information.

My observations over the years are that students seem to really engage when doing research if they are asked to dig deeper–for example, to compare unlike ideas, to create something new, to link two fields of interest, or to bring in outside information.    It’s exciting when you see students bring in an article they read outside of school that relates to what they are researching, or ask their parents about it, or have that “aha” moment about finding some really significant piece of information.

Pondering these articles leads me to ask how can we better help students engage and make those connections during our research projects?  

Can we write assignments so they ask students to do something with “raw data?”  And how can we create authentic questions that engage students at a deeper level?   Food for thought…