Teaching Information Fluency

THE BOOK IS HERE!

A year ago Dennis and I were contacted by Scarecrow Press to write a book based on the materials and understanding on our website, 21cif.com. The result of the collaboration is a guide to embedding information fluency instruction into mainstream courses--chiefly middle school and high school.

The chapters include dozens of internet search challenge examples, including a whole chapter analyzing Genochoice.com, one of our favorite Virgil Wong sites, plus evaluations of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, the Harry Potter Sorting Hat Personality Test, and much more. The appendix can be used as a guide to creating mini lessons for instruction that reinforces Common Core Language Arts Standards while teaching valuable digital research skills.

Teaching Information Fluency is available on Amazon.com

Citation Challenges

Tracking down missing information for a citation can be frustrating. Even though citation styles like MLA, Chicago and APA make allowances for missing information (e.g., no author, no date), many times all the information is available.
Tracking down elusive information takes some practice, careful scanning and investigative searching techniques.
For this reason, we created the Citation Challenge and Citation Assessment activities.

Citation Challenge offers three challenges of increasing complexity.

• The first level requires players to identify what information satisfies citation requirements. For example, what is the Author's name, the date of publication, the publisher, the Web page, etc.
• Level two is a live Internet search to locate information on an article on a NASA site. The player must locate the name of the author, date, etc. by scanning and browsing.
• Level three is another live search that awards extra points for inputting the missing information in MLA style.
• The whole package is an interactive companion to the Citation MicroModule on the 21cif.com site.

The Citation Assessment offers four levels of difficulty from beginner to advanced. The beginning levels require finding information on a web page with no further searching. The advanced levels require tracking down the original source of the information, using truncation to navigate to directories and metadata to determine last modified dates. Each level has two live searches. Players get a percentage score at the end and can print the results to hand in. We don't recommend using these activities as the basis for a grade. However, they do make good benchmarks for demonstrating skills and progress.

White House Browsing Challenge

Since most of the Search Challenges on 21cif require using a search engine, it was time to create a browsing challenge.

Email Challenge

What makes browsing challenging is keeping keywords in mind that you are searching for and skimming for links that are relevant. In this case, the challenge is to find the URL of the whitehouse.gov page where you can write an email to the President.

The challenge starts at the home page of the White House. From there the solution is three clicks (actually four if you count the anti-spam control feature). This shouldn't take a careful reader more than a couple of minutes, which is how the timer is set.

Browsing presents novice searchers with problems. It's easy to click on useless links and get lost. One of the most challenging assessment tasks a couple years ago on Information Researcher 4.0 was a browsing task where the answer was only two clicks away. I was surprised how many students and parents couldn't find their way.

Fortunately, browsing can be accomplished using multiple routes. Some are longer; the goal is to be efficient, taking as little time as possible.

This is a good activity to see what keywords students have in mind for finding a way to write to the President. In this challenge, students can find a form to use to write to the President. Interestingly, the email address of the White House is elusive!

Refreshed Challenges

As information gets relocated online, links break. When this happens it is usually a simple task to find its new home.

This happens all the time, but today's example comes thanks to a reader who discovered bad links in two of our Search Challenges: The Air Race Challenge and Freezing Milk Challenge (now not in Flash).

It took a lot longer to edit the coding and upload the changes than it did to find new answer pages (the examples we had cited led to 404 errors).

In the case of the Air Races, we changed the challenge because sites like wiki.answers provided a correct answer, short-cutting the Deep Web search process. The specialized database we referenced proved difficult to go back before 2007, so a new challenge was in order.

For the Freezing Milk Challenge, the ownership of the information changed and consequently the url. Following links to the new home, it required a pretty simple query on the new site to find the original article. Information doesn't typically disappear online; it gets relocated.

Try the new Challenges. Both require Deep Web searching. They may not be ideal for novice searchers, however. Air Races is intermediate; Freezing Milk is advanced, due mainly to experimentation required to find an effective query.

Reflections from ISTE

The Blogger's Cafe is nearly empty.

Most conference-goers have left the building for the River Walk and dinner plans. I had a late lunch so I've got a little time on my hands. Time for some reflection.

I presented at one session here in San Antonio. It was actually a BYOD workshop entitled "Five Mini Lessons in Information Fluency." From what I could tell it went well. Later tonight I'll email the participants and share with them more resources for taking the ideas home.

The hardest mini-lesson to get across, in my estimation, is browsing. The concept of browsing isn't difficult, although it can be a tricky way to search. Using a search engine is the other way and that is more oriented to efficiency and results. Browsing is an adventure and it's hard to define what strategy always works best, other than to say that this way of searching is like playing a game of "hot or cold" where the objective is to keep getting warmer until the information being sought is found. Unlike the childhood game, there is no one to tell you if your browsing is getting you to a warmer or colder place. It's an activity where interpretation and evaluation happens with every click. It seems a lot easier than that, but an incredible amount of time can be wasted by browsing.

Squeezing five lessons into 90 minutes should have been snap, but we were rushed. Consequently, a teaching method I would like have used with browsing was passed over while we talked through the steps. Talking isn't a great way to teach browsing. It's ultimately a hands-on activity.

But the big danger is that when a class full of students starts to browse, whether they are in fifth grade or teachers and librarians at an ISTE conference, the "aha" moments are hard to capture. That's why I recommend using a tag-team approach to browsing practice. Provide only one computer. Assign a challenge to the group. Ask for a volunteer to come up to the front to drive the computer for one decision. View the result of the student's choice as a group. Decide if things are getting warmer or not. It's unlikely the student will get the information needed with one click. Therefore, the other decision this student makes is to select the next driver (or just go down the aisle or around the circle, as you wish).

After each click--no student gets more than one mouse press--elicit a group response: warmer or colder? If colder, the next student might merely want to hit the BACK button to return to a warmer place. As an alternative, you could spice up the activity by providing a "phone a friend" option if someone is really stuck.

Here's the challenge I used at ISTE for which I could have used this approach. I showed a typical Language Arts assignment to write a paper on the American Dream. Other than financial prosperity, I required the participants to identify other themes using a Subject Directory. The top level of the Subject Directory lists categories like Home, Research, Sports, etc. The challenge is to mine down into a category (not all will be effective) to discover themes. It's a good use of browsing as a brainstorming strategy. In the workshop, this approach would have eaten up some time, but I think participants would have benefited from the interaction a lot more than the solo searching they did. It's an activity that works on a lot of levels: skimming, recognition of relevance, finding relevant and new keywords to follow in the results, failed attempts, persistence....

Here's a link to the Lesson prompt I used. Perhaps you can find ways to use an activity (not necessarily the American Dream content) like this with your students.

Tomorrow morning I head back to Chicago and home. It was good to take a moment to reflect in the Blogger's Cafe.

Freshness Dating Wizard

One of the more elusive search feats is to determine a date of publication. It's right up there with trying to track down an author when the creator of information uses a pseudonym or no name at all.

This prompted me to create a new search wizard to retrieve metadata from pages. In this case, the metadata is http header information that is transmitted when pages are sent by a server. If the pages are htm or html (static Web pages), some of the metadata includes Last-Modified information, which may be a clue to the age of the information.

Last Modified information may be retrieved from Firefox using Page Info (right click on the page), but it seems to have disappeared from other browsers. Since students who use our Information Researcher challenges don't always have access to Firefox, providing another search tool seemed a good idea.

Last Modified information is not an exact way to determine when material was created, but it is useful. For example, if you search this html blog post (the one you are reading now) using the Wizard, you will get Last-Modified information for the last time the entire blog was updated. Blogspot is an example of a dynamically created page, not a static page. Elements of the page, namely the ads, have never appeared here before you clicked on it. If you search metadata for older blogs on the site you will see the same Last-Modified date. Another method is needed to determine the publication date of a blog, which is fairly easy to find at the top of the post itself or the URL.

Dynamically created pages don't really send Last-Modified data, but the day and time the server sent the information, which is when you searched for it. Students can be confused using Firefox for this reason. Dynamically created pages (those that have extensions such as .asp, .php, xhtml, and no extensions at all) are displayed in Firefox's Page Info as having a Last Modified date. In our Wizard, if you use the simple version it will tell you if Last-Modified is not available.

There's also a more comprehensive version of the Metadata search that retrieves server information, expiration date, cookie information, etc. for those who would like to see more information about a page, particularly dynamically created ones.

Try the new Wizard!

More information on Static and Dynamically created pages

Fake Tweet Result of Phishing

As follow-up to the story yesterday about @AP's fake tweet, it has been reported that the hacked message came about an hour after company employees received an expertly-crafted, spear-phishing email.

Spear-phishing is getting harder to detect as successful practices inform future "phishes." What doesn't work is abandoned, reworked and the culprit becomes increasingly less suspicious.

It may come as a surprise or not, but 19% of spear-phishing attempts are successful. Someone in an organization takes the personalized bait and hands out secure information.

The effects of spear-phishing can be avoided by fact checking. I haven't seen a copy of the message received by AP employees yesterday. It would be interesting to see it and fact check it.

Can anyone find it?