Spreading the Gospel of Information Literacy - How Do We Get the Kids to Care? Podcast by Joyce Kazman Valenza
Joyce Kasman Valenza’s podcast focuses on the necessity for students to have information literacy skills when leaving high school. She equates the way students search now with search engines to the “fast food” of the internet. They grab the first two hits on Google and call it adequate. She proclaims the need for students to acquire these skills in high school by incorporating the whole school in the process of teaching information literacy skills. With a vested interest students will become better searchers and it will benefit them throughout their lives.
Her webpage is fabulous with many resources for lessons. She also has a blog "Joyce Valenza's Neverending Search" Great resources from a passionate Library Media Specialist.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
(Thanks, Tina, for the awesome resource. I spent more than an hour following many links - definitely bookmarked this one!)
Search engines are surely part of the epidemic of Internet "fast food" habits of high school students. At the high school where I am doing my fieldwork, 10th grade health students were creating Web pages on an assigned drug. The health teacher had wisely offered them some reliable Web resources where they might do some research. In the midst of the project, I spoke with a young man who was typing in his content to his Web page. He had printed the entire article from a site about his drug; he claimed he was now translating it into his own words as he typed it into his site. He said he planned to cite his source.
As information specialist, I cringed at an entire project's content being only the paraphrasing of someone else's entire article! Were I the teacher, I would request that the student redo his site using a number of resources. (Additionally, I am wondering about copyright enfringement. This seems fishy to me, because it is, in some ways, equivalent to copying the article directly and putting it on his site. This may or may not be valid, possibly depending on whether the site is available to the public or not.)
As information specialist, this gave me some insight into teaching about great resources. If the students don't have clear guidelines about how to use those resources, and expectations for the final project, then you might just be wasting your breath!
Susan
As instructional partner, I might like to address some of the concerns raised by Susan with the teacher. It sounds like the teacher did quite a bit of good work in setting up the assignment by identifying reliable resources. It doesn't sound like the learning goals were as clear as they might have been: if the student Susan described was meeting the requirements of the assignment, the student was not required to analyze, synthesize or critically respond to information, and therefore the learning was limited. (I taught writing long enough to recognize that the assignment might have been well designed, but the student might not have met the criteria for a successful project!)
Post a Comment