Comments on 21rst Century Info. Fluency / Illinois Math and Science Academy

This is a link to a very highly reviewed site full of resources to help students and teachers get better at online research. [Added later: OK, I've read some of the articles, now. This is a GREAT site for personal and teacher background information about information literacy on the internet, starting with pretty basic stuff! There are probably also useful student things, here, but so far I LOVE the teacher information! It's so clear, readable, and well-organized! And, hallelulah, the part that I started reading is a really good match to what I currently know and want to learn. Yay!!] Here's the link:

http://www.21cif.imsa.edu/rkit/newRkit/gettingstarted.html

It has a new address, 21cif.imsa.edu = 21cif.com, because it's become a private project.

There are some free "kits". (The kits seem to be fully available online, and consist of related sets of teacher articles, student activities, etc.) For example, I looked at the first one, "Getting Started". It looks at how to avoid getting out-of-date information (I think), searching vs. browsing, etc. It includes six model lessons (grades 3-12) that have been transformed ("easily", they say -- But I'm not clear on why we should assume that digital is better) into digital lessons. There are some challenges that I think are meant to be fun ways that students or teachers can test their developing search skills.

OK, these topics look WAY COOL! I wonder if I can delve more deeply into these and then use them in one of my final projects. (Right now I'm at least as interested in developing my OWN teaching skills as my students'!)

I read the linked article on browsing a live page vs. searching a cache. I'm tired and not catching everything right now. One thing I understood was that each search engine's crawler visits pages on a different schedule. The blurb about the page refers to the cache, but the title link at the top is to the live site. The live site might no longer be presenting the information in the blurb -- you might have to browse around the site to find it. Sometimes if a web address changes, the major search engines can lose their links to their archived copies. Sometimes a broader database such as archive.org, or a more specific one such as mathforum.org, can maintain those cached pages for much longer.

I read the linked article on browsing vs. searching. Browsing means clicking links from page to page. It's slow, "primitive', and speculative. Both skill (scanning and choosing keywords) and luck are involved. (This makes me feel better. I occasionally enjoy browsing -- when I'm not looking for particular information but rather just pursuing interesting threads for the fun of it. What helps is rich content in an area I'm interested in, links that aren't broken, and no particular time pressure or need for an actual product or specific answer. Examples include the Holocaust course that I took from Facing History and Ourselves a couple of years ago {"Enjoy" doesn't fit the type of content in this case, but I did find it deeply involving and never begrudged the hours and hours that I spent following links and reading well beyond the course requirements}, and also the evening that I spent following links about project-based learning earlier in this current course. . . . On the other hand, when I am trying to find particular information, especially if there's any time pressure, browsing feels very slow and time-consuming -- like I'm being sucked into a great big black hole without really understanding how. This article helps to make that feeling make sense.)

Oh, I think I understand: When you do a search in a search engine, the search engine is ALWAYS relying upon its archived pages for what results to return to you. For breaking news, it will take a while for the archiving crawlers to come across the relevant articles.

Google is a database. (You know, I never thought of it that way. I just thought of it as a search engine. It's a database; that's why you can use the Google search box to locate specific live pages.)

There's a reference to a Deep Web search. I think that means that you try to dive deep, not wide, by typing in a fairly simple search term and then continuing your search using one of the sites that comes up as your new "base". . . . Later, one of these articles says that Deep Web searching means looking for information that will be in a different database than the one you start out in.

Having a good vocabulary is useful for browsing because the author's words may often be different or more general than the keyword that you first think of.

The article says that browsing may require a lot of backing out of deadends, which "requires patience, persistence, and time." This is part of what frustrates me when i'm actually looking for the answer to a specific question or for specific kinds of information.

The article describes the "typical search experience" as querying a search engine, then choosing among the results and clicking the title links to go to the live pages. That's what I've almost always done. However, the linked article "Cache Advantage" lists some really intriguing advantages to clicking on the link to the CACHED (archived) page, instead: the link will never be broken (Yay!!), the page retrieved will definitely match the snippet description, and the keywords that match the query will be highlighted (which can be helpful for younger students who aren't very good at scanning large blocks of text, yet). . . . Cool; I never thought of these advantages! And, earlier it implied that many sites are crawled quite frequently, so I don't think the information would be very out-of-date.

Some search engines: Google, Yahoo, Ask, JSTOR and the WayBackMachine.

This article http://www.21cif.imsa.edu/rkitp/newRkit/databases/search_archive.html also contains some basic practice activities for students about searching caches.

The query site:animal.discovery.com meerkat "uses a special operator to search only animal.discovery.com for occurrences of meerkat".

OK, next I want to read one of their articles on queries. It will have to wait, though, because I need to "pull back a couple of levels" and check out some other areas from last session's readings. I have enjoyed this browsing so far tonight, though. I LOVE this site, and can't wait to learn more from it!!