Internet is the dominant medium of students for doing homework. We should be thinking about redefining how reading is taught since most students are reading online.
Question: When you do a search for November on Google, why is Alan November #4? We should be able to explain why this site is at that location as easily as we can explain why a particular book is on a particular shelf in our libraries. Dewey and the alphabet are important in storing and retrieving print – we need to know how the search engines work to help our students.
Average person who does a search on Google just looks at the first screen – comparable to only looking at the first shelf in the library.
Good site to teach critical thinking about information is the martinlutherking.org site. (Note – this site is blocked in my district) Things to ask about this site:
1. Who put it there?
2. Who wrote it?
At the bottom of the site, it says “civil rights library” – actually put up by stormfront.org, a white supremist group. David Duke has a podcast from there?
Who controls the information? If we can’t answer that, we are at a loss.
How do you find the author of a web site? Go to http://www.easywhois.com – copy and paste url, and it will tell you who the owner is. Each web site has to be registered and someone has to pay an annual fee to register the site. This site will tell you who the owner is.
In a book, there is a title page, and we teach how to find the author, publisher, etc. We need to know how to do a comparable skill on the Internet because there are no title pages on the internet. We have to unlearn some of the ways we have been doing things. You can’t go to the internet with a book mentality. You have sometimes have to leave the web site itself to find out who owns it.
Alan November believes the role of the librarian is more important than ever.
Comment by AN – of all the books published, most are terrible! After a huge gasp from the audience, he explained what he meant. Of all the millions of books published, we only select about 1% to purchase for our libraries. Up until about 5 years ago, librarians were trusted to provide books needed for information gathering, now anybody can go to the internet and look for whatever they want. Since we can’t “control” the access, we need to teach critical thinking. When “we” controlled the information, “we” didn’t need to worry about critical thinking. This is one reason we are more important than ever – we should be teaching critical thinking.
How sites make the cut in google:
1st cut – domain name matches what you enter as a search term
2nd cut – name of the web site matches what you enter as a search term
3rd cut – content on page
4th cut – links coming into the site – the more the site is linked to, the more it goes up in google.
AN’s site is http://novemberlearning.com/
There are two types of hyperlinks – first is the forward links on the web page, second is the back links that come into the web site that you can’t see.
Example, to find out who links to the martinlutherking.org web site, first go to www.altavista.com
Then enter link:www.martinlutherking.org into the seach box.
To narrow this search to find out if any education sites link to this site, add host:edu to the above search term.
With books, you just read the book – you don’t ask who else has read the book, but on the internet, everything is connected and you can take advantage of that connectivity to build patterns for analysis.
Another example is to look for information about General Gage and the American Revolution in altavista. Most of what comes up are American sites. To get the British perspective, add host:ac.uk to search strategy. Interesting lesson would be to have students use skype to debate with students in Britain, record it, and post it on your blog.
Audience discussion about all the sites that are blocked in schools -even this SCASL blog seems to be blocked by some districts. AN says we should write a memo to try to get unblocked, important to not give up this fight.
Talk to students about how everything on the internet is saved. Show Way Back Machine http://www.archive.org/web/web.php to demonstrate how all web pages are archived every couple of months. Remind students that if they put stupid things online, they will be haunted by the web pages forever! Be careful!
Good search engine is www.answers.com only pulls from about 100 or so reference sources. One really nice feature is that citation information is at the bottom, and students can choose MLA format for bibliographies.
Funny moment – real/virtual combo. How do we introduce global perspective? Demonstrated using host country in search (example — host:tr to limit to Turkey).
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