Information Literacy

A few years ago, I was on a school district-wide team that was assigned the task of teaching teachers about Information Literacy and how they might create curriculum that helps foster the development of those skills in their students.  We worked with The Big 6 model which is designed to work with any problem that involves information.  The 6 steps of Big 6 are task definition; information seeking strategies; location and access; use of information; synthesis; and evaluation.  The thing that is great about it is how it breaks down what most adults do without even knowing they are doing it into concrete steps that students can work with.  Essentially, it helps to provide a vocabulary for what we are (often) already teaching them in less overt ways. It isn’t any ground-breaking new teaching device, it just helps to talk about the process.

My sense is that information literacy has been taught for many years here at this school.  While the process of seeking, evaluating and synthesizing information may not be overtly talked about across the curriculum, students seem to be learning it well in the same way most of us probably did: by watching and imitating the adult learners around us, learning to ask questions of ourselves in the same way that they were asking us.  We all figured it out as we went along and the need, particularly, for the skill of evaluating information was not as pressing to us as high school students as it is today.

I think that for the most part, students at this school are learning to be information literate.  I have seen this working with students on research papers.  Because they know that using high-quality resources is expected of them, they most often do second guess the information they find.  Many also go out of their way to find resources in a variety of formats, and beyond what we have here at the school.  Because it is expected of them to be information literate, they are learning to be through practice.

The real challenge in teaching information literacy is to encourage students to use this in all aspects of their learning (if not all aspects of their lives) and not just once a year for their term papers.  Being information literate seems like more of a requirement in life than it did before the dawn of the “information age.”  There is so much information in the public domain (this blog for example) that these skills must be deeply ingrained in order for students to be able to form their own ideas and opinions out of all the clutter.  Ideally, they’d feel as second nature as tying one’s shoes.

Curriki.org

I was curious about the article’s mention of Curriki.org as I had never used this particular resourse.  I went to check it out, spent about 20 minutes there, and found as I usually do, that it takes FOREVER to wade through information on these kinds of sights to find something of particular use to me.  I need a tour guide – or, better yet, I need a personal assistant who I can have sort through it all for me.  I frequently wonder, if there are so many schools out there, and our common goal is to prepare kids for the “real world,” why is each individual teacher inventing their own curriculum?  It’s no wonder to me that education hasn’t changed much over time.  There just isn’t time in a teacher’s day to be as innovative as we’d like to be.  Not to mention that we don’t always know how to use technology more effectively or how to teach kids to be “global learners.”  I know how to teach kids to solve physics problems, and I hope that my class also teaches kids to think critically, to trouble shoot a problem, and to work effectively in teams.  But I don’t need “technology” to accomplish those goals.  (Not that I don’t use technology – I really do, I just wonder how much re-invention is really necessary.)

This comment seems important enough to elevate from a comment to a post.

Following is a rationale for making “information literacy” a curricular goal.  What do you think?

There may be something we should be doing as part of our curriculum. In the article, Dell executive Karen Bruett is getting at the point about technology and education when she says, “It’s important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,”. There is just sooooooo much out there. It’s overwhelming, and not at all helpful if one cannot navigate. We should investigate to what level we should help our students learn how to effectively integrate technology into their education and life, rather than just think about whether we are using technology to help our teaching. When I do the stock simulation with the seniors, I see this situation illustrated. They certainly know how to Google something, but they are not equipped to dive beneath the surface, expand their search, manage and validate the results, and then realize how to further use technology (an Excel spreadsheet for example) to enhance their work. So maybe it’s not important that we look at integrating technology into, say, an English class, but rather we look into offering “information literacy” opportunities for our students (such as that school in Astoria, NY).

Really “Real Genius”

I think that “Real Genius” pretty much sums up what we’re trying to do, right?

Over and out,

Phuc

Course: Life……….Teacher: Google ???

I found the brief discussion of American text books and their tendency to be overloaded with superfluous details, to be particularly interesting. I have continually scaled down the amount of vocabulary and topics covered in each unit of my science classes. For example, I will have my students read only 300 or so pages of an 800 page textbook during our year-long course mainly because there is just way too much information included in the text. It would take years to get though it all. I like the idea of teaching depth and not breadth, because technology can offer breadth to our students any time of the day. We teach them the how and why, and they can access the what from any computer anywhere. For example, how important is it to have middle schoolers memorize the bones in the body, when they can bring up a detailed diagram (or picture of a cadaver!) with a few keystrokes?

That said, I don’t believe this logic applies across the board. I don’t believe that learning U.S. geography, for example, is a waste of time now just because Google Earth is so accessible. Recently, I polled my 7th graders randomly to see how many of them knew which was the only state to border Maine. I was surprised to find that nearly 1/3 did not know! I believe there is some value to knowing what is beyond your back door, even if it means learning through memorization. I think educated “global citizens” should know many issues and facts without having to type them into a search engine. 

It is our job to decide what should still be taught in the traditional classroom, and what should be left to Google. It is also our job to teach students how best to make use of the technologies available to them. Lowell wonders if this should be embedded in curriculum or curriculum on its own, and I would lean towards the former. I think there is more value in learning technology through our core disciplines, than on its own. Students who are taught best how to apply technology will get the most from it.

Really real?

I think Taffy was bang on when she noted that the Time article was less about technology and more about reasoning, collaboration and problem-solving.  We use a great deal of technology to reach help kids develop competencies in foreign language beyond the limits of scheduled class meetings.  They are great incrementally, but go only so far  - on-line practice of structure, reading of texts, etc. are interactive on the written level; one then must wonder how modern spoken language study then is distinct from studying Latin, traditionally not an oral/aural language. Listening to PodCasts or recording oral reports on an MP3 are unilateral; they do not recreate the dynamic and nuanced process of human conversation. Tech tools in foreign language, I worry, can lull us into a false sense of confidence that our kids are working their skills effectively and distract attention from the key goal of the language classroom and most difficult of speaking another tongue – negotiating meaning.

 

Steven Pinker, the MIT brain honcho, and author of “The Language Instinct,” says when talking about the power of language – “Simply by making noises with our mouth, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other’s minds.” He posits this interesting question that wonders if  human language function is somehow computational – [Do] English sentences embody the information that a processor would need to perform valid sequences of reasoning – without requiring any fully intelligent homunculus inside doing the “understanding.” He responds with a declarative “No,” for three reasons – language is ambiguous (e.g. “Stud Tires Out”); it can lack logical explicitness; conversational language constructs such as nouns to pronouns, or definite vs. indefinite articles are based on the concept of “co-reference” and “deixis” respectively; we can talk about, “Fred,” “the man,” and “him,” in a single utterance and be talking about the same person, or infer completely different meaning between ‘a’ vs. ‘the.” As Pinker puts it, “The representations underlying thinking, on the one hand, and the sentences in a language, on the other, are in many ways at cross-purposes.” For me as language teacher, that is the dichotomy that I struggle with. We want our students to be able to problem solve, reason, collaborate in another language, moving through the cultural roadblocks that that process necessarily involves, and for that they need to the face-to-face interaction that technology can enhance but not replace.

Really?????

Already I see a theme emerging in the Time Magazine article comments: technologies are tools to reach preexisting educational goals, not worthy of being goals themselves. Thus, the simple answer to my question – Should we adopt curricular goals around teaching technology use? – is No. We should only consider using a technology in the classroom to the extent that it serves an already established goal.

That logic is familiar. It has served educators well for a long time to the extent that the technologies we have employed in the classroom – such as the blackboard – were not likely to be relevant in adult life and weren’t very complicated to use anyway. Clearly a blackboard is a tool and not a goal. We settled into a comfortable dichotomy between important educational goals and the means to help students reach those goals.

To be honest, I really still subscribe to that logic and dichotomy in my daily thinking about teaching. But I am beginning to wonder if relegating the emergent communication technologies to the same tool shed as the blackboard is like saying that writing is a means to reach the important educational goals of thinking and communicating, so that if we come across a better way to teach our students to think and communicate, then we can dispense with teaching them to write. Why teach the term paper or the analytical essay or the lab report when we now have digital storytelling?

In the same way that we would all agree that such thinking is absurd, I am beginning to wonder if continuing to think of the emergent communication technologies as merely the latest means to other, timeless and important ends is equally absurd. Is there really still that clear dichotomy between means and ends? Anybody wondering the same thing?

-Lowell

Lowell’s Time Magazine article

Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006
How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century
By Claudia Wallis, Sonja Steptoe

There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls–every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. “This is a school,” he declares. “We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.”

American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.

This week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of Education Secretaries and business, government and other education leaders releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.

Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math–the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing–is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here’s what they are:

Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are “global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages”–not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy–the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated–”put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that’s been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that’s where most new breakthroughs are made. It’s interdisciplinary combinations–design and technology, mathematics and art–”that produce YouTube and Google,” says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what’s coming at them and distinguish between what’s reliable and what isn’t. “It’s important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,” says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today’s workplace. “Most innovations today involve large teams of people,” says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. “We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.”

Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts? The Skills commission will argue that it’s possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools. But without waiting for such a revolution, enterprising administrators around the country have begun to update their schools, often with ideas and support from local businesses. The state of Michigan, conceding that it can no longer count on the ailing auto industry to absorb its poorly educated and low-skilled workers, is retooling its high schools, instituting what are among the most rigorous graduation requirements in the nation. Elsewhere, organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Asia Society are pouring money and expertise into model programs to show the way.

What It Means to Be a Global Student

Quick! How many ways can you combine nickels, dimes and pennies to get 20¢? That’s the challenge for students in a second-grade math class at Seattle’s John Stanford International School, and hands are flying up with answers. The students sit at tables of four manipulating play money. One boy shouts “10 plus 10″; a girl offers “10 plus 5 plus 5,” only it sounds like this: “Ju, tasu, go, tasu, go.” Down the hall, third-graders are learning to interpret charts and graphs showing how many hours of sleep people need at different ages. “¿Cuantas horas duerme un bebé?” asks the teacher Sabrina Storlie.

This public elementary school has taken the idea of global education and run with it. All students take some classes in either Japanese or Spanish. Other subjects are taught in English, but the content has an international flavor. The school pulls its 393 students from the surrounding highly diverse neighborhood and by lottery from other parts of the city. Generally, its scores on state tests are at or above average, although those exams barely scratch the surface of what Stanford students learn.

Before opening the school seven years ago, principal Karen Kodama surveyed 1,500 business leaders on which languages to teach (plans for Mandarin were dropped for lack of classroom space) and which skills and disciplines. “No. 1 was technology,” she recalls. Even first-graders at Stanford begin to use PowerPoint and Internet tools. “Exposure to world cultures was also an important trait cited by the executives,” says Kodama, so that instead of circling back to the Pilgrims and Indians every autumn, children at Stanford do social-studies units on Asia, Africa, Australia, Mexico and South America. Students actively apply the lessons in foreign language and culture by video-conferencing with sister schools in Japan, Africa and Mexico, by exchanging messages, gifts and joining in charity projects.

Stanford International shows what’s possible for a public elementary school, although it has the rare advantage of support from corporations like Nintendo and Starbucks, which contribute to its $1.7 million-a-year budget. Still, dozens of U.S. school districts have found ways to orient some of their students toward the global economy. Many have opened schools that offer the international baccalaureate (I.B.) program, a rigorous, off-the-shelf curriculum recognized by universities around the world and first introduced in 1968–well before globalization became a buzzword.

To earn an I.B. diploma, students must prove written and spoken proficiency in a second language, write a 4,000-word college-level research paper, complete a real-world service project and pass rigorous oral and written subject exams. Courses offer an international perspective, so even a lesson on the American Revolution will interweave sources from Britain and France with views from the Founding Fathers. “We try to build something we call international mindedness,” says Jeffrey Beard, director general of the International Baccalaureate Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. “These are students who can grasp issues across national borders. They have an understanding of nuances and complexity and a balanced approach to problem solving.” Despite stringent certification requirements, I.B. schools are growing in the U.S.–from about 350 in 2000 to 682 today. The U.S. Department of Education has a pilot effort to bring the program to more low-income students.

Real Knowledge in the Google Era

Learn the names of all the rivers in South America. That was the assignment given to Deborah Stipek’s daughter Meredith in school, and her mom, who’s dean of the Stanford University School of Education, was not impressed. “That’s silly,” Stipek told her daughter. “Tell your teacher that if you need to know anything besides the Amazon, you can look it up on Google.” Any number of old-school assignments–memorizing the battles of the Civil War or the periodic table of the elements–now seem faintly absurd. That kind of information, which is poorly retained unless you routinely use it, is available at a keystroke. Still, few would argue that an American child shouldn’t learn the causes of the Civil War or understand how the periodic table reflects the atomic structure and properties of the elements. As school critic E.D. Hirsch Jr. points out in his book, The Knowledge Deficit, kids need a substantial fund of information just to make sense of reading materials beyond the grade-school level. Without mastering the fundamental building blocks of math, science or history, complex concepts are impossible.

Many analysts believe that to achieve the right balance between such core knowledge and what educators call “portable skills”–critical thinking, making connections between ideas and knowing how to keep on learning–the U.S. curriculum needs to become more like that of Singapore, Belgium and Sweden, whose students outperform American students on math and science tests. Classes in these countries dwell on key concepts that are taught in depth and in careful sequence, as opposed to a succession of forgettable details so often served in U.S. classrooms. Textbooks and tests support this approach. “Countries from Germany to Singapore have extremely small textbooks that focus on the most powerful and generative ideas,” says Roy Pea, co-director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. These might be the key theorems in math, the laws of thermodynamics in science or the relationship between supply and demand in economics. America’s bloated textbooks, by contrast, tend to gallop through a mind-numbing stream of topics and subtopics in an attempt to address a vast range of state standards.

Depth over breadth and the ability to leap across disciplines are exactly what teachers aim for at the Henry Ford Academy, a public charter school in Dearborn, Mich. This fall, 10th-graders in Charles Dershimer’s science class began a project that combines concepts from earth science, chemistry, business and design. After reading about Nike’s efforts to develop a more environmentally friendly sneaker, students had to choose a consumer product, analyze and explain its environmental impact and then develop a plan for re-engineering it to reduce pollution costs without sacrificing its commercial appeal. Says Dershimer: “It’s a challenge for them and for me.”

A New Kind of Literacy

The juniors in Bill Stroud’s class are riveted by a documentary called Loose Change unspooling on a small TV screen at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, in urban Astoria, N.Y. The film uses 9/11 footage and interviews with building engineers and Twin Towers survivors to make an oddly compelling if paranoid case that interior explosions unrelated to the impact of the airplanes brought down the World Trade Center on that fateful day. Afterward, the students–an ethnic mix of New Yorkers with their own 9/11 memories–dive into a discussion about the elusive nature of truth.

Raya Harris finds the video more convincing than the official version of the facts. Marisa Reichel objects. “Because of a movie, you are going to change your beliefs?” she demands. “Just because people heard explosions doesn’t mean there were explosions. You can say you feel the room spinning, but it isn’t.” This kind of discussion about what we know and how we know it is typical of a theory of knowledge class, a required element for an international-baccalaureate diploma. Stroud has posed this question to his class on the blackboard: “If truth is difficult to prove in history, does it follow that all versions are equally acceptable?”

Throughout the year, the class will examine news reports, websites, propaganda, history books, blogs, even pop songs. The goal is to teach kids to be discerning consumers of information and to research, formulate and defend their own views, says Stroud, who is founder and principal of the four-year-old public school, which is located in a repurposed handbag factory.

Classes like this, which teach key aspects of information literacy, remain rare in public education, but more and more universities and employers say they are needed as the world grows ever more deluged with information of variable quality. Last year, in response to demand from colleges, the Educational Testing Service unveiled a new, computer-based exam designed to measure information-and-communication-technology literacy. A pilot study of the test with 6,200 high school seniors and college freshmen found that only half could correctly judge the objectivity of a website. “Kids tend to go to Google and cut and paste a research report together,” says Terry Egan, who led the team that developed the new test. “We kind of assumed this generation was so comfortable with technology that they know how to use it for research and deeper thinking,” says Egan. “But if they’re not taught these skills, they don’t necessarily pick them up.”

Learning 2.0

The chairman of Sun Microsystems was up against one of the most vexing challenges of modern life: a third-grade science project. Scott McNealy had spent hours searching the Web for a lively explanation of electricity that his son could understand. “Finally I found a very nice, animated, educational website showing electrons zooming around and tests after each section. We did this for about an hour and a half and had a ball–a great father-son moment of learning. All of a sudden we ran out of runway because it was a site to help welders, and it then got into welding.” For McNealy the experience, three years ago, provided one of life’s aha! moments: “It made me wonder why there isn’t a website where I can just go and have anything I want to learn, K to 12, online, browser based and free.”

His solution: draw on the Wikipedia model to create a collection of online courses that can be updated, improved, vetted and built upon by innovative teachers, who, he notes, “are always developing new materials and methods of instruction because they aren’t happy with what they have.” And who better to create such a site than McNealy, whose company has led the way in designing open-source computer software? He quickly raised some money, created a nonprofit and–voilà!–Curriki.org made its debut January 2006, and has been growing fast. Some 450 courses are in the works, and about 3,000 people have joined as members. McNealy reports that a teenager in Kuwait has already completed the introductory physics and calculus classes in 18 days.

Curriki, however, isn’t meant to replace going to school but to supplement it and offer courses that may not be available locally. It aims to give teachers classroom-tested content materials and assessments that are livelier and more current and multimedia-based than printed textbooks. Ultimately, it could take the Web 2.0 revolution to school, closing that yawning gap between how kids learn at school and how they do everything else. Educators around the country and overseas are already discussing ways to certify Curriki’s online course work for credit.

Some states are creating their own online courses. “In the 21st century, the ability to be a lifelong learner will, for many people, be dependent on their ability to access and benefit from online learning,” says Michael Flanagan, Michigan’s superintendent of public instruction, which is why Michigan’s new high school graduation requirements, which roll out next year, include completing at least one course online.

A Dose of Reality

Teachers need not fear that they will be made obsolete. They will, however, feel increasing pressure to bring their methods–along with the curriculum–into line with the way the modern world works. That means putting a greater emphasis on teaching kids to collaborate and solve problems in small groups and apply what they’ve learned in the real world. Besides, research shows that kids learn better that way than with the old chalk-and-talk approach.

At suburban Farmington High in Michigan, the engineering-technology department functions like an engineering firm, with teachers as project managers, a Ford Motor Co. engineer as a consultant and students working in teams. The principles of calculus, physics, chemistry and engineering are taught through activities that fill the hallways with a cacophony of nailing, sawing and chattering. The result: the kids learn to apply academic principles to the real world, think strategically and solve problems.

Such lessons also teach students to show respect for others as well as to be punctual, responsible and work well in teams. Those skills were badly missing in recently hired high school graduates, according to a survey of over 400 human-resource professionals conducted by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. “Kids don’t know how to shake your hand at graduation,” says Rudolph Crew, superintendent of the Miami-Dade school system. Deportment, he notes, used to be on the report card. Some of the nation’s more forward-thinking schools are bringing it back. It’s one part of 21st century education that sleepy old Rip would recognize.