Search Practice

Since last April, Google has published a daily search challenge called 'agoogleaday'.

These little challenges have only one correct answer but many ways to arrive at the answer. Since these are similar to the Search Challenges found in my blog, I thought I'd take a closer look.

Agoogleaday was created by Dan Russell as a daily trivia game to encourage creativity and search practice. Unlike the Internet Search Challenges found here, there is no timer or focus on a specific search technique or strategy and the search engine returns results only prior to April 2011. More on that shortly.

A nice feature of the puzzles is the hints that show effective keywords. This kind of scaffolding could be helpful to students. I found that I was able to solve some without searching at all, since I knew the answer to begin with. But the notion of practicing search skills has value.

Why return results that are no newer than April 2011?  According to the author, this is to prevent people from spoiling the puzzles for others by posting the answers online. This doesn't prevent people from posting the answers, it only prevents the Deja Google search engine from retrieving them. At one time I was concerned about this with my Search Challenges as well, but it hasn't proved to be a problem. In fact, people have posted the challenge questions online hoping someone will provide an answer. Most of the answers I've seen are incorrect, which ironically makes the challenges ever better and drives home the point that you need to evaluate the information you find online.

One aspect of agoogleaday for me has a less-than-positive connotation for learning and that is 'every search has one right answer.' While it may be appropriate for trivia puzzles, it is not how information usually works. There is seldom one right answer for significant questions. If the questions educators are asking students have only one right answer, we're not requiring enough thought from students. Or as David Thornburg has quipped, don't ask students questions that can be answered by searching Google (or posted by spoilers). You can still use a search engine. You just have to use your head to figure out a good answer.

That makes it more challenging both for the teacher and the student. And that's a good thing.

How high? The San Jacinto Challenge

On my trip to the Palm Springs area--love the desert--I learned that, due to seismic activity in the area, many of the peaks surrounding the Coachella Valley are continuously being pushed up.

That means many of the posted elevations are inaccurate.

Thinking that could make a good search challenge for freshness, I searched for information on what I read was the second tallest peak in Southern California.  Turns out there's disagreement regarding that and, not surprisingly, the same peak is listed with several different elevations.  It kinda presses home the point that, according to some, the area is in a state of upheaval.

So here's the challenge for you or your students:

What is the elevation of San Jacinto Peak? Is Wikipedia currently right or wrong? How can you tell? (what information do you need in order to verify the accuracy of the information?)

Post your answer to the challenge. How did you determine the answer is accurate?

Embedded Evidence, External Evidence

Over the weekend I created two new tutorial resources for the Website Investigator series (WSI): Accuracy and Evidence. In addition to knowing who is the author and/or publisher and when it was written or published, finding embedded evidence and external evidence can be very important in verifying the credibility of the source and the content.

In the simplest terms, credibility depends on source and content. Information about the author and publisher helps to define the source--where did these ideas originate? Is the author recognized as an expert? Does this publisher submit works to careful review before posting them? Embedded and external evidence helps to define the content--how are words used (signs of objectivity or bias)? When was this written? Who links to it? What do experts say about the content? A questionable source may produce brilliant content and a trusted author may produce flawed content--so it's important to check both before accepting information at face value.

As educators know, the majority of students today tend to accept information at face value. Somehow, merely finding information feels sufficient. Investigating it is unimportant.

To encourage investigation, students need to be shown and practice a few basic techniques. These are not hard to learn and don't take much time. Compared to searching (which I now call speculative searching--when you don't know exactly what words to search with and where to look), investigative searching is much more precise: the keywords are clues embedded in the information and the places (databases) to search are well-defined.

Think of embedded evidence as clues in the text, the url and metadata. These clues can be used to investigate the accuracy of information and often lead to external sources that have already done an evaluation.

The new Accuracy tutorial focuses on three areas: Finding powerful clues embedded in a Web page, checking the evidence by doing a secondary search and triangulating, checking what three different sources have to say about the information.

The companion Evidence tutorial emphasizes using queries to find external evidence, checking whether pages that link to the information support it or contradict it and triangulating information sources (examples that are different from the Accuracy module).

These tutorials are geared for middle schoolers through adults. There's increasing demand for similar activities aimed at elementary grade students, and that's my next project.