Searching Myth Exposed (again)

source

It's not true: growing up digital makes one an effective digital searcher.

We've stated this before in our book, Teaching Information Fluency, and now it comes from another source: Google.

Here's an article covering Dan Russell's (senior researcher at Google) talk at Strathclyde University: http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/education/great-internet-age-divide-is-a-myth.25672713

The solution starts with teachers.

Research needs to be included in the curriculum.

"Knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts you find, how to organize and use the information you discover are all critical parts of being literate...."

More Study Welcome

Last week a group of moderate Democrat legislators signed a letter directed to the head of the National Academy of Sciences to study "digital literacy among pre-kindergarten through high school students and the types of digital education programs that are being deployed in schools." source

Among the notable points:

• 2013: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) finds that American young adults ranked near the bottom for using digital skills to solve problems, including skills to acquire and evaluate information;
• Appropriate policies and measures need to be put in place to tackle this disparity through pre-K to Grade 12 education programs;
• Five aspects of digital literacy are highlighted for study:
• define skills and abilities that comprise 'digital literacy'
• summarize current levels of digital literacy across grades, ethnicity, SES and location
• characterize the range of program currently available to help students in preK-12
• review and synthesize research on effectiveness of digital education programs
• recommend federal, state and local policies to reduce gaps in abilities and educational offerings

More study, especially from the top, is welcome and overdue. Without policies, gaps will persist. Hopefully best practices in digital information literacy will become more widespread as a result.

Five Surprises regarding Information Literacy

EBSCO just published its "surprising" findings regarding college students' information literacy, or as I like to call it, information fluency competencies. This is an indication of what research skills students are taught (or not) in high school and what sticks.

Surprise 1: Grade Nine Bootcamp is the one that sticks. A positive correlation was found between what and how students are taught about research in their freshman year of high school and how they conducted research in college. Ninth grade is viewed as a "critical period" for training.

Surprise 2:  Lazy doesn't mean Slothful.  Students value and practice efficient practices--there's only so much time for research.

Surprise 3: Wikipedia--The Open Secret.  Even though professors warn against using it, students typically depend on Wikipedia anyway.

Surprise 4: When I need Help I ask my Friend.  They tend not to ask a librarian even though they are aware that librarians are available to help. If their friend remembers anything from ninth grade bootcamp, all the better.

Surprise 5: The Calculations that go into Evaluating Results. Student seldom go beyond the first page of Google results and use the bold keywords as a test to whether they should invest time skimming an abstract.

Not-so Surprising Conclusions:

1. Students are comfortable with technology, but are by no means expert searchers.
2. Students need significant support to perform college-level research

Read the complete article here: http://user-94545020520.cld.bz/Strategic-Library-October-2014#10/z

Email Spam

source: photobucket

Information Fluency applies to more than academic research.

Here's an example of a spam email that could trip up an unsuspecting friend, especially if the circumstances were right.

I happen to know that my friend Fred is not currently in the Philippines. But if I didn't know that or, worse yet, knew that he was visiting there, I might be less skeptical and more willing to help.

Here's the email, which I assume has been going around the Internet for some time:

Good Morning,

I really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about our trip, because it was impromptu. we had to be in Philippines for Tour. The program was successful, but our journey has turned sour. we misplaced our wallet and cell phone on our way back to the hotel we lodge in after we went for sight seeing. The wallet contained all the valuables we had. Now, our Luggage is in custody of the hotel management pending when we make payment. all we have left are just our Passports. I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but i have only very few people to run to now. i will be indeed very grateful if i can get a short term loan from you ($2,600). this will enable me sort our hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you can afford in assisting me with. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. let me know if you can be of any assistance. Please, let me know soonest.

All hopes on you

Peace

Fred

Interestingly, Fred is the type of person who would sign Peace. This could be a coincidence, but the day is coming when spammers who know something about us, including if we're on a trip, will certainly take advantage of that information.

The conclusive investigative technique I used to verify that this was not the Fred I know (who uses better grammar than this) was to compare the email addresses.  The From email was in fact Fred's. The Reply to was not, but eerily close: an additional letter had been added to the name, as in this example:

original:  ftxyx@yahoo.com   close copy:  ftxyyz@yahoo.com

It pays to check email addresses.

If you have examples to share (even with other solutions), post them here.

A New Framework for Fluency?

This article caught my eye today:

Reimagining Information Literacy Competencies 
by Barbie E. Keiser
Posted On July 29, 2014





'The task force was charged with updating the information literacy competency standards for higher education “so that they reflect the current thinking on such things as the creation and dissemination of knowledge, the changing global higher education and learning environment, the shift from information literacy to information fluency, and the expanding definition of information literacy to include multiple literacies, e.g., transliteracy, media literacy, digital literacy, etc.”'

Full article

The higher education community has always been at the forefront of the information "literacy" movement. This new thinking represents new challenges for high schools, middle schools and elementary schools to redefine how they prepare students for college and personally motivated research.

One wonders if it will renew interest in information preparedness in primary and secondary schools, and how.

 

Finding a Publication Date

Here's a common problem: You find a resource online that you want to cite, but the publication date is missing.

The case in question here is this article by Joseph Renzulli: A Practical System for Identifying Gifted and Talented Students.

The article references a number of studies and articles from the 1980's. How recent is the article itself?

It's not a hard problem to solve. Normally, start on the page itself and if clues don't reveal themselves, truncate the URL to see if there's a directory with date information, or try Page Info to see when the page was last updated. Upon investigation, there doesn't immediately seem to be a listing of articles on the site and the last update for this page was in 2013. This doesn't seem that accurate since the article is mostly about older findings.

So one investigation technique is to query Google (or another database) with the title of the article.

Try it and see what date you find.

Finding a File Not Found

Seeing this result is a pretty common Internet experience:

I came across one today as I was doing research on entrepreneurship for a chapter I am writing for a National Association of Gifted Children handbook. The claim is made that the number of college-level courses in entrepreneurship has increased by a factor of 20 since the 1980's. I'd like to cite the original source, but when I click the link in the article to the pdf the article author included, I get the 404 Error.

Rarely, if ever, is this a dead end. As I told participants in a workshop last week, there's almost always a way to find the information. The first place to start is at the source. Look around the original site, in this case it's the Kaufmann Foundation, for clues to the whereabouts of the "not found" information.

The missing file is this: eship-ed-comes-of-age_report.pdf

Staying close to the source, see if you can find the report.  Post your solution to Comments.