Search literacy is way too narrow…

I can’t believe that Information Literacy has not been mentioned in this discussion – this ability to find, evaluate and use information
ethically is a not so new basic skill. Unfortunately, it gets little attention in the current testing madness environment.

Not all students are fortunate enough to have a parent walk them through such an assignment – in my district of approximately 70% kids of poverty, students rely on the school to provide them with these needed skills. Since they are not routinely taught, we now have a digital divide of skills as well as access.

Hopefully, someone such as yourself can help bring this issue forward.
The solution is simple. Making it a priority is not.

Leslie

Our schools should NOT be teaching site-specific knowledge except as examples. For instance, when i was in 6th grade, i learned how to use wordperfect (DOS version) in english class (Ok, so i do most of my text editing in vi these days…but DOS wordperfect is STILL not relevant!). It was probably the biggest waste of time i encountered in all of school. On the other hand, learning how to play with LOGO and BASIC were things that built my foundation of knowledge, and playing games and hacking around at home helped to build my interest.

I suggest you consult with a professional librarian — librarians have a long tradition in information retrieval (and are generally quite knowledgeable in the variations in criteria used among the many many information sources available). Perhaps a “children’s” or “young adult” librarian may be the best resource (insofar as they may be best informed with respect to the safeguards and/or editorial review undertaken by information providers) — I guess the last thing you might want is to have to explain a “questionable” result to a concerned parent. I expect any professional librarian should have no difficulty whatsoever explaining basic search methodologies (and perhaps it’s even better to leave this “teaching” job to the librarian anyways — depending on the pedagogical abilities of the person in question

BTW: If you would like to get a “snapshot” impression of what people (and kids) are generally currently searching for, take a peek at http://most-searched.info (that shows the top searches at Google the New York Times and Yahoo).

I would love to teach my students search literacy, and I even teach in a school that would support me in that, but while I consider myself pretty computer literate, I don’t even know all of Google’s bells and whistles, much less what else is out there. I had never heard of chunkit until I read this thread. Where can I find this information so I can teach my students search literacy? For whatever it is worth the school is using a dual system of Linux/Windows while I am on a Mac. Thank you for any good pointers.

You can get a lot of objectionable definitions from define. It’s more reliable than Wikipedia but not as reliable as the average grocery store dictionary.

Speaking of homework though, I’ve been doing a lot of research lately for a writing class. Regardless, I have started to use ChunkIt!, a search engine that definitely helps ease sometimes cumbersome searching.

http://www.getchunkit.com

Maybe its something to show your daughter, who knows, but it makes google slightly easier to work with sometimes.

The whole point is that Google should be exposing these useful features, in the appropriate way, at the appropriate time, to its users. The users should not have to engage in periodic “learn every little command that Google offers” study sessions.

Let’s do a little experiment: Suppose for a moment that you do NOT know that the define: command exists. Suppose you are one of the majority of people who has never seen that command on Google, that Google has never made you aware of it.

Now, go to the Google homepage. My task to you is to use Google to discover the existence, and proper usage, of the define: command.

You may use the search box to do this. But I challenge you to do your searching without using the “define” keyword, because, if you’ll recall, that’s the whole point of the experiment; you don’t know that a command by this name exists.

Let me know how many searches / how much time it takes you to find it.

You may also use any links that on the Google homepage, to directly navigate to any page telling the existence of the define: command.

Let me know how many links you have to click, to find it.

If you do find it easily, I’ll eat my words. If you don’t find it easily, then realize this: Teachers will never be able to teach a skill, if the search engine itself does a terrible job of letting people know that it exists.