Wiki+Reflections--+Group+2

February 15, 2012

Eagleton, Dobler, and Leu highlight the importance of teaching students to evaluate web content, giving specific strategies for teachers to use to help students navigate web content. I found this especially useful, because I think that it can be difficult to know exactly what to teach students when it comes to evaluating web content. Sometimes, I fear, adults are just as clueless or confused when it comes to evaluating web content as children. Because the Internet is still somewhat uncharted territory for the school setting, we are not completely familiar with the best ways to help students use reading strategies for the web.The Eaglton articel highlights this fact by callign the internet a "vast, open, and uncatelouged library". This is very true. When I was in grade school, I remember being trained to use the library and naviagte the call numbers and shelves. But now that we live in the information age, students must learn to navigate the new virtual "library" of the internet, which has no call numbers and shelves to look through!

In the fall, I student taught at West Genesee, and I taught two classes of seniors who were engaged in research projects that involved web articles and Internet database searching. Even though I am rather proficient in using web databases, I really felt that it could be complicated to explain to students which sites were most useful and why. I found a lot of students trying to use blogs as resources. I was able to show them how to go back to the original sources that bloggers were citing, but students often seemed frustrated because they wanted instant information.This instant is somthing that is evident of the information age that we live in. Beacuse we live in a very NOW kind of world, everythign must be instant. And because of that, we as teachers must train our students to see that research is not instant, but it is a process, if you want the best quality end product.

I do think that students have many different approaches to Internet searching, but the most important thing to teach students is to think critically. As the authors state, "Regardless of which strategy they employ, it is critical that learners have a research focus firmly in mind by this stage or they will lose valuable time surfing websites that may not contain answers to their questions" (p. 165). I find it to be very intresting that critical thinkers are not born, but are trained, as brought about by both articles. I think back to my high school days: I never really knew how to question things until I was taugt how to do it in college. Now, I can say I don't take eveything as face value.

The Lawless, Schrader, and Mayall piece was really interesting because it showed how prior knowledge affects students' Internet reading comprehension. I was also really fascinated by the type of prior knowledge that the experimental group received. According to the authors, it was information provided to establish a schema, not to give detailed information: "The content brieﬂy outlined the major topics in the ﬁeld of human genetics at a very global level. Its intent was not to afford the learner with in-depth information about speciﬁc facts or concepts related to genetics. Rather, it was intended to provide readers with an overall schema for the domain into which new knowledge could be integrated and serve to boost participants’ prior knowledge" (p. 295).

Yet after reading this article, I had a few questions, in regards to my own internet research experience. When I do reserach on a topic that I have no prior knowledge about, I don't think that it effects my internet reserching experience, but moreso enhances it because I'm learinng as I go. For me, I understand the goal of the reaserch study was to show teachers how importnat prior knowledge is for thier students, however I'm just not convinced that students who have no prior knowlege of a subject suddenly do worse than those who do. And also, the article didn't take into account other studets such as ESL learners.

I wasn't surprised that the experimental group increased their knowledge of genetics after the treatment, but I was really surprised that the control group's knowledge of genetics decreased as a result of the treatment! That's pretty scary. This makes me think that we definitely need to scaffold students' Internet research and help provide a schema for them.

However, the article acknowledges limitations and that the results cannot be over-generalized. How can we translate this into practice? I think back again on my student teaching experience-- students were researching many different topics including biotechnology, military weapons, and solar energy-- all topics that I am not an expert on. So how can we provide schema for the various topics that students might search. Maybe we should assess their prior knowledge before they launch into a project? Inevitably, they will still come across content on the Internet that they still need to be armed for. How can we provide prior knowledge for everything students and adults come across??

On that note, in the spirit of talking about students evaluating that which they read, I wanted to share a few snippets from literallyunbelievable.org, a site with a compilation of people's Facebook reactions to posted articles from //The Onion//.





What I love about the first example is that the last commenter exclaims that the study must be true because the study was published in Psychological Bulletin, which is an indication to him that the study must be real. In the second example, someone actually points out that the article is from //The Onion//, and the following commenter doesn't register what //The Onion// actually is. These are somewhat silly examples, but people do still get tricked by web content, or believe things that are not true. We have to provide students with tools to really evaluate that which they read!

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The end of the Eagleton articel gave a list of reliable search engines that teacerhs and studnets can use. This made me think of the most popular search engine, which is google. I found this video on Youtube about the dangers of Google, which made me think twice about how this popular seach engine has began to monopolize content on the internet.

I think one of the important aspects of wiki writing should be a common goal or task. In the little video we saw last week the narrator described a scenario where e group of people were all going on a camping trip (their common goal). Everyone could include SOME sort of writing and it didn’t just fall on a few smart or motivated people. If people just post to a wiki and then expect people to comment or discuss, it’s more like a blog. So, a common goal (or end product—like a group annotated bibliography, perhaps) is a good starting point. I think that working towards creating a common definition for something works best, because it's rather objective, and draws off of the knowledge of many different people. I often think about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-- when the contestant can poll the audience and the audience knows more than just an individual. I think that collective groups of people know more than just one person can. As for classroom use—again any product that lends itself to collaboration, such as a newsletter or newspaper would be a good starting point. Research could be done collaboratively if the topic is broken into parts and each person is responsible for a section. The group can edit and revise for cohesiveness and style as necessary. I think it would be difficult to //compose// sentence-by-sentence in a collaborative way. As with this, clearly formative assessments along the way would be necessary (as per the Tarasiuk or Tharp article of last week). Another classroom idea might be to collaborate on ideas only rather than actual composition—ideas with a common goal (camping trip, volunteer work, student council dance, etc). I also wonder about the website Typewith.me-- is this considered a wiki? I've seen examples of this being used to create short stories or other fictional tales by students in a class and it worked pretty well. Perhaps wikis are not only used to create objective factual information.

This also is a question I have: Are wikis considered more academic than blogs? I feel like in an academic setting, there might be a distinction.

If the goal of a wiki is to be multimodal, perhaps a focusing question that requires or invites (at least at first) multimodal entries could be a place to start. See what people come up with (cartoons like Ossman did) or a video or picture, give feedback, and it may just become the “norm.” Once people get used to something it may become part of what they would do on a day-to-day basis. In the articles that we read, students were very excited to be able to use pictures on their wikis and they even used the wikis as ways to transmit information to each other on how to add pictures to the wikis.