Searching isn't as hard as Thinking.

Just google it. You're bound to find something you're looking for.

Finding is no longer the challenge it once was. Knowing what you are looking for remains no easy matter.

Asking the right question usually precedes touching a computer. What are the hours of the Louvre? Go to the computer. What is 4 degrees Celsius in degrees Fahrenheit? Go to the computer.

These are the average one-off questions an Internet search is really good--and fast--at answering.

But what about the occasional harder question? Harder questions include: a) those that lack precision in what is being asked, b) those with competing or rival answers and c) those with no known answers.  Googling the Internet is not particularly useful at answering this last type.

A and B type questions occur frequently and make easy searching harder. I've blogged before on the need to fact check B type questions to avoid trusting misleading and/or malicious information. Investigative searching is a remedy for establishing the credibility of answers.

Let's focus on A, ambiguous questions. These are questions that may be answered different ways (with different answers) and still be right. An example used on our web site is for the search challenge: What is the top speed of earth's fastest animal? Like most ambiguous questions, this question is unintentionally ambiguous. Only after searching and finding rival answers does its ambiguity become increasingly apparent. This requires real thinking.

Skimming the top ten Google results for the query speed fastest animal, possible answers include:

• cheetah (3)
• peregrine falcon (2)
• sailfish (2)
• pronghorn antelope
• wildebeest
• lion
• thompson's gazelle
• quarter horse
• man
• cow dropped from a helicopter

The student is confronted by a common problem: which one is right? The underlying problem is not that there are multiple answers (which one is right?) but that these are answers to different questions (which question am I supposed to answer?).

The problem could be simplified by rethinking the question: what animal travels the fastest? Now the differences between air, water and land don't factor in (cheetah is fastest on land, sailfish is fastest in water and peregrine falcon is fastest in air). The fastest speed belongs to the falcon.

But another search result--a cow dropped from a helicopter--reveals further ambiguity in the question. The originator of the question may have assumed the animal needs to travel under its own power. In that case, the falcon, which 'cheats' by virtue of gravity, could be bested by the cheetah. By the same token, what prevents an astronaut orbiting the earth from beating the falcon? It ultimately depends on the question.

The example is ridiculous but illustrates how 'right' answers may differ depending on how a question is interpreted and how thinking is aided by searching. Questions that leave room for interpretation make Internet searching more difficult (and may be more interesting). Teachers are advised to try the searches their students are likely to use in an attempt to avoid asking ambiguous questions and inviting 'smart' answers in return.

For the individual, questions may be improved the same way: try a search and see what happens. Don't expect the best answer the first time because the right question has not yet been asked. It's very hard to think of a question you haven't though of yet. Iterative queries are good at helping discover and refine questions.

So, how would you ask the fastest speed question? Go ahead and post your response.

Here are a couple more ambiguous questions that need refinement. See if you can figure out an unambiguous question without searching; then try a search.

• How many buffalo are living in North America today? link
• Between 1918 and 2012, in what year did Americans pay the most for a gallon of gas? link

Freshness Challenge: Young Entrepreneurs

In my career at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy I get to work with young entrepreneurs. I also enjoy playing guitar. When I came across a video about Alex Niles, a South Florida Middle School student who won a NFTE regional prize for his custom made guitar business, I was intrigued. His work is pretty impressive and he has solid endorsements. This led to a search for Niles Custom Guitars.

Can you buy one of Alex's guitars today? If so, where or how?

Here's a link to more information about Alex (about two-thirds the way down the page).

Post your answers to this blog.

Re-release of Author Tutorial

Another refreshed tutorial is now available on 21cif:  Author


Author is the first in our series of Evaluation tutorials. Earlier last month we re-released Publisher. In the coming weeks expect to see two more: Date Checking and Back Link Checking.

If you want to try the Author module in a non-flash format, we just completed a revision.

There are three sections to the tutorial:

Practice the skills: to help novices, there are some practice exercises that introduce methods to solve the challenges in the tutorial. These focus on fact checking queries, truncation and browsing.
Find the Author: four challenges of increasing difficulty to identify the author of a page or site.
Investigate the Author: using clues on the site and external sites to determine if the author has a good, poor or unknown reputation. There are three of these challenges.

Try it out!  Tutorials may be completed in as little as a few minutes by individuals or extended into a classroom activity if desired. The final page may be printed and turned in if you want to see how students fared.

Start the tutorial

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

Infowhelm -- something to be avoided?

Infowhelm: too much information. Better than not enough information, I think.

Ian Jukes popularized the term a few years ago and it gets a lot of traction in library circles. Information overwhelm describes the unimaginable amount of information that is produced each day, each hour, each minute....  It's an impressive amount, but what does it really mean?

Is there too much information to process? No question.  Do many people really think they have to 'know' it all? Doubtful. (If they do, they are still living in the 20th Century.)

I'm not about to get stressed out about too much information, no more than I'm stressed out by the realization that's there's too much oxygen for me to breath. It's when there's not enough that I'm bothered.

Too much information is not a bad thing. A person can only process so much of it anyway, so it's not like it's going to make us sick. The real problem is that we're not paying close enough attention to the information we can handle.

In an age of info-bombardment, we tend to duck and take cover, metaphorically speaking. There's too much to look at, so we only take a cursory glance at everything. I know that an oversimplification, but there's a lot of truth to it.

Dennis and I spend a lot of energy showing people how to slow down and look more closely at the information right in front of them. Take a minute to read a page. It's going to be more informative than skimming 10 pages in the same amount of time.  What you missed on the first page was worth discovering.

A key investigative information strategy is not to stray too far too soon from the page you are evaluating.  Clues are easily overlooked. For instance, in the model lesson about DNA and designer babies, one of the tasks is to discover the author of the material. Start by scouring the page. Look for clicks that may contain hidden information.  There are at least three possible authors. Can you find them?

Don't run away from information. Spend quality time with it.

SearchReSearch

I like Daniel Russell's blog, SearchReSearch. A lot of other people do as well. In a nutshell, Daniel, a search 'anthropologist' at Google, posts a search challenge once a week and moderates comments (answers) to the challenges. I featured one of these a month ago.

Those of us who teach information fluency/literacy or help patrons locate information online can find a lot of useful content in the comments to Daniel's blog.

In a loose sense, the comments are curated, mainly to prevent inappropriate posts. It's easy to spot disagreement in the comments--rival answers or solutions to the challenges. If there's a right answer, Daniel tends not to acknowledge it.

The comments provide insight into people's search strategies and processes, which is why I think Daniel writes the blog. I encourage librarians and teachers to pull excerpts to demonstrate what effective searchers do.  This is essentially the "quiet" version of a think aloud. I believe it's helpful for students to see (or hear) how good searchers tackle a challenge. It can be more even more instructive to let students try (or start) the same challenge, then call time to see what they are trying. Then provide an example of good searching.

For example, here's the May 20 challenge:

Background: Barbara Gordon was bringing a book to the inhabitant of Wayne Manor when she realized that librarians could also become superhero crimefighters. The question of the day, though, isn't about superheros (although I truly believe librarians are superheros), but is about that book she was bringing to Mr. Wayne.  How much did it cost to print the original 1600 1700 copies of that book in the first press run, according to the printer? 

Russell then gives a couple contextual clues: this involves comic books and the price should be given in original units.

This is a multi-step challenge. First, you need to track down the name of the book. That alone could be challenging for students. From there the challenge continues to find out information about the book, similar to fact-checking.

Here's a comment from a librarian about this search:

Since comic books almost always go hand-in-hand with computer nerds (present company included), I figured that there had to be a DC wiki type page and of course there was (http://dc.wikia.com/). Here, I looked up Barbara Gordon who I already knew as Batgirl. In her entry, I clicked on the link to her first appearance which was Detective Comics #359. It is here that I found out that the book she delivered was rare. 

Doing a search for rare book "barbara gordon" was my next step (and I realize now I could have done that initially, but I like exploring). The fifth hit was a Wiki article about the Bay Psalm Book which mentions that it was the book Gordon brought to Bruce Wayne, etc. The article also mentions that it was published by Steven Day (or Daye). It was the first book published in the New World. Cool! 

So my next step was to do a search for "bay psalm book" steven day cost and couldn't find the answer. However, in my searching I found a page that mentions that the original title is The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre. Yoinks! 

This led me to do a search for that plus original cost. This got me a result in Google books which is basically a version of the book with an introduction that gave me the answer. The cost for publishing 1700 copies (not the 1600 you mentioned) was 33 pounds, used 116 reams of paper at a cost of 29 pounds, and the book was sold for 20 pence. 

All in all, this took me about 15, maybe 20 minutes and I loved every second of it.

Not only is this insightful information for a search researcher, it's loaded with tips that can be helpful to less practiced students.

An alternative, if there was time, would be to have all students write a search log on how they did this, or attempted to do this. Collect the results, remove names, re-distribute and discuss insights, shortcuts, failures and successes.

By the way, did the librarian get it all right?

Patent Search Challenge

Dean Kamen

I offered a research session this week for students in a high school entrepreneurship camp called the TALENT UPgrade Experience.  As part of the two week camp, students conduct a lot of online research. For example:

• Is my business name already trademarked?
• Is my product idea, or some part of it, patented?
• How do I find the size of my market?
• Who is my competition?
• Where do I find information about how to ... (fill in the blank, from how to use PHP to add, edit and drop records from an online database, to how to solder photovoltaic cells, to how to boost the signal from a Peltier chip, etc.)

What's nice about this kind of research is that it is interest-driven. Students have personal reasons to search for and evaluate answers. 

To help make sure they know that the first two bullets are Deep Web searches, I provided some challenges.  Here's one of them you may want to try:

CHALLENGE 1: Dean Kamen

What was the title of Dean Kamen's first patent?
How old was he when he filed this patent?


Submit your answers--and how you got them--to this blog.