Finding an (elusive) Author's name

 

One of the most popular (visited) pages on 21cif.com is our collection of Citation Wizards.

Each wizard (MLA, APA, Harvard, etc.) indicates information that is needed for a proper citation. One of these is the author's name. It is hardly any problem identifying an author's name in conventionally published sources. Self-published Internet sources are different. An author isn't required to leave his or her name; some prefer to leave just a first name or pseudonym. 

A 12-part tutorial helps students (and teachers) with tools and strategies for finding elusive author's names. No subscription is required. 

This tutorial package is paired with MicroModule: Author as a companion exercise.

Try it out! How many challenges can you complete?

New Tutorial Challenges

Hone your Fluency Skills.

Yesterday I led a workshop at the ICE Conference in St. Charles, IL for teachers, administrators and librarians on the topic of Internet Search Challenges: Google and Beyond.

The themes included competencies on which fluency depends, challenges that require these competencies, search strategies and techniques, how to use challenges with individuals and groups. We never were able to try all the Challenges during the 2.5 hour workshop--even though we never took a break. I shouldn't be surprised: 47 tutorial challenges were created for the workshop.

The tutorials are grouped into three categories: Locate, Evaluate and Cite.  Locate is comprised of three sub-categories: Browsing, Querying and Pesky Search Challenges. All these categories are further divided into Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced Challenges. Elementary is suitable for young and new searchers (no matter what grade), Intermediate builds on those skills and Advanced represents skills high schoolers should possess before entering college (and beyond).

So what I told the participants, I'm telling readers of this blog: try out the challenges for yourself. Use them with individuals and groups. Experiment with them. Think about what works and could work better. I'd love to get your feedback.

Here's where to go to get started: http://21cif.com/tutorials/challenge/challenge-directory.html

An aside:  The Internet went down 10 minutes prior to the start of the workshop and didn't come back for a while. You might imagine it's hard to teach Internet skills without the Internet. We actually filled the first hour offline with a discussion about what skills are needed at what grade levels, when to introduce skills, and how to teach students pre-Internet skills without the Internet. When you think about the Digital Information Fluency model, the first two questions ("What am I searching for?" and "Where will I search?") happen before touching a computer. So being offline didn't slow us down and was still productive.

New Release of Publisher Challenge

I spent some time this week revising and refreshing the Publisher Challenge, a tutorial to help learners track down the publishers of online information.

Periodic maintenance is needed due to link migration: users get those nasty 404 errors (which are not usually a dead end, but that's another challenge). In the case of the Publisher tutorial, designed in Action Script 2, I wanted to add the functionality of Action Script 3, and that required rebuilding the code from scratch. My apologies to iPad and iPhone users, but the tutorial is still Flash which you can't use.

In the tutorial you'll find three sections: a techniques practice page--methods you'll need to use to solve the challenges, a "find the publishers" page and an "investigate the publishers" page. Together, these require the type of investigation involved in determining whether content is trustworthy based on who published it. This fill-in-the-blank/click the appropriate button tutorial is paired with a MicroModule about the Publisher, to give background and explain why it's important to know about the publisher. That has also been refreshed.

Give them a try. Use them with students as part of a lesson on Web evaluation, the ownership of ideas, or one of these specific cases/themes you'll find in the tutorial: poetry publishing, gun laws or school health.

Publisher Challenge

Slinky Challenge (#006)

The Toys in Space Challenge started with Apollo 8 taking Silly Putty into Space. After the Challenge had been up for a year or so, the answer (Apollo 8) was no longer difficult to find.

So the next iteration was "On what NASA mission was Slinky first taken into space?" That was an intermediate challenge that required searching the NASA database. With the profusion of information, it was only a matter of time until a simple word query was able to find an answer without searching anything other than Google's database.

Today, the challenge reads: "Who commanded the first NASA mission to take a Slinky toy into space?"  This no longer requires finding the right database to query, but it does require some strategy and careful skimming of results. Using the FIND command is also helpful in sorting through pages of content looking for a relevant term--i.e., one of the keywords you used. Using fewer rather than more keywords is also helpful. It may also help to think of how an answer might be worded and use those keywords. I'd be interested in hearing what strategies or techniques you use in finding the answer.

This is the sixth 'refreshed' Challenge. My goal is to keep at least 10 Challenges up-to-date that focus on slightly different search skills.

Try the Challenge

Leap Years, Leap Seconds

Leap years are curious occasions. They occur every four years. Well, almost.

There are some four year stretches when a leap year is not observed. A century is not a leap year unless it is divisible by 400. That's why the year 2000 was a leap year and why 2100 is not.

This little factoid got me reading further and that's when I found the "leap second:" an adjustment to time made to coordinate atomic time with the earth's rotation. Atomic time is based on periods/oscillations of the Cesium-133 atom at the ground state (if you want to know more about that, it's easy to look up). The earth is very gradually slowing down (to find out why, that can also be looked up). To keep the clock and the earth in sync, there's the leap second.

Let's say you what to capitalize on a topic of current interest and reinforce information fluency with students. You could have them search for NEXT LEAP SECOND. These happen more often than leap years. And there's another one coming up later this year.

But if you look at the returns from this search in Google, you may see two conflicting reports:

About Leap Seconds

www.timeanddate.com › Time Zones

Next leap second on 2012-06-30 23:59:60 UTC. The last leap second was inserted like this, in the UTC time scale, and corresponding times elsewhere in the ...

When will the next leap second occur? - Yahoo! Answers

answers.yahoo.com › ... › Science & Mathematics › Astronomy & Space

3 answers - Feb 2, 2010

Top answer: None are currently in the works. Since leap seconds depend on factors that can only be observed, not predicted, leap seconds themselves cannot be ...

Obviously, these answers don't agree. If searchers don't pay attention to the date information, they could be misled.  It's a good opportunity to point out the importance of paying attention to the published date of information.