Kajder begins this chapter with something that I often gloss over in my classroom - preparing students to search the web. Typically, when I bring my students to the media center to use the computers, I provide a brief and usually unsuccessful preparatory lesson for using the internet. I never really thought about it, but why don't I spend as much time preparing students for an online information search as I do preparing students to read a novel set during the Great Depression? as Kajder remarks, "(W)hy don't we empower students before we set them loose?" I think, like Kajder, I just assume that students already know how to search the internet and find appropriate information online. Kajder reminds me that I should never assume. She also reminds me that I really do need to not only evaluate what my students know, but what exactly I am sending them out into the world wide web to research.
This is where I see the value of Webquests. Webquests provide students with a task, process, and most importantly (for me and my young students) resources that are preselected by the teacher. As Kajder explains in Chapter 7, "Flexibility was not an option, simply becuase the search time had already been spent." Students are presented with websites that are provided by the teacher and therefore there is no question about their validity or appropriateness. I like this, especially when I think of my freshman and sophomore students surfing the web, looking for pertinent information.
However, as my students get older, and as I begin designing the curriculum for my 12th graders this fall, I don't want to completely control their online searches. I mean, they are seniors, they will be going to college (hopefully) the following year, and they need to learn how to search the internet and evaluate online texts. While I will probably use a Webquest with my senior writing class, I don't want to neglect the opportunity for my students to learn how to use the web. I like Kajder's search engine activity where she has students in her class team up and evaluate different search engines using the same key words.
One thing that I know I must change for next year is my attitude when entering the computer lab. I definitely need to be a more active teacher while my students are in the lab. I must admit that I am guilty - I bring a stack of tests, plant myself at a table, and grade while my students are searching online. I do remove myself from the pile of grading, ever 10 minutes or so, and do "the walk." I quickly peruse the screens on which my students are working, closing windows with solitaire or google earth or whatever else has nothing to do with what they should be doing. And then I return to grading. Kajder reiterates the fact that lab days are sometimes her busiest days of teaching. I need to remember that.
So...these chapters, along with the other assigned readings for this week really remind me of the fact that technology is not necessarily a tool that will make my life or my job easier. In fact, it may make it more...interesting and time consuming (I don't want to say difficult)...at least in the beginning. But the benefits far outweigh the time is will take to design an effective webquest or class website. Like anything new, it will just take time.
Course homepage
Course homepage
Tuesday, 26 June 2007
Monday, 25 June 2007
On Kinzer and Leander
As interesting as I thought this article was, it left me questioning, if we don't incorporate technology into our classrooms are we producing non-literate students by today's standards of literacy? They noted that "the children who have entered the school since 1990 are being shaped within a world that is not dominated by print in a way that their teachers' and parents' world was" (546). These statistics represent our children and as technologically aware (I won't say savvy) as this twenty-eight-year-old is, I can't compete with the amount of exposure that my students have had. Yet, many times I see that as their downfall. I think that technology brings with it such a rush for things right here, right now. Everything is immediate, including the amount of information that the students get via the internet. In their article they mention that children's literature can't be limited to printed texts, a statement that I completely disagree with (548). There needs to be a base from where literacy is taught. I continue to voice my opinion about the necessity of balance, but even more so when it comes to the younger students. Students need to know the basics, they need to understand printed text before they can fully understand and follow hypertext. In their article, they later talk about the necessity to be able to follow hypertext you need to rely on your linear reading ability (552). How can you develop this ability without first learning to simply read linearly? Even the argument for hypertext, although beneficial in further exploring information, is a tool that begins with basic skills and expands on them. How can you expand on information if you don't have the initial information to begin with? I agree that to produce literate students we need to incorporate technological literacy in our curriculum, but to base their literacy around this median, in my opinion, is dangerous. It creates a constant reliance on technology. The idea of hypertext reminded me of those books when I was a kid that gave you the opportunity to choose the endings. There were multiple endings you could choose for each chapter and depending on what you chose it would lead you to a different ending. It gave you choice and made you feel like you had a say in what happened in the story. Yet, a child that didn't have the ability to foreshadow or even create meaning out what they had previously read, wouldn't be able to understand the concept or the uniqueness of the opportunity that type of book offered - all of which are reading skills that are developed and are considered good reading strategies. I don't believe that you can process information the same online or through a screen as you can in printed text.
"Technology is a clear presence in our schools and in our nation" (546). They talk about the access that schools have to technology in this day and age, but our class suggests that although we all have access to technology and use it to email, receive and respond to memos and parents, create documents to use in class, record our grades, etc., does this count as using technology in our classes? Obviously the answer is no. Kinzer and Leander, alond with Kajder, provide ideas as to how to include technology successfully into our curriculum. But my arguemnt is that to say that by not providing our students with these technological aspects is creating illiterate students screams "WE'RE FAILING!" to me. So many of us in this class, and in classrooms in general, work hard to provide our students with a clear understanding of what literature, composition, and communication in general are that to say that not including technology is doing such a great disservice to them bothers me. I agree that more technology needs to be included in the classroom but to take the weight away from the understanding and working with printed text will be doing an even greater disservice. I think we all agree that our students our technologically capable and that helping them grow in those skills is something we all welcome, yet not at the expense of relinquishing the gift of composing an essay or debating a text that can make an individual or a class grow both intellectually and personally.
"Technology is a clear presence in our schools and in our nation" (546). They talk about the access that schools have to technology in this day and age, but our class suggests that although we all have access to technology and use it to email, receive and respond to memos and parents, create documents to use in class, record our grades, etc., does this count as using technology in our classes? Obviously the answer is no. Kinzer and Leander, alond with Kajder, provide ideas as to how to include technology successfully into our curriculum. But my arguemnt is that to say that by not providing our students with these technological aspects is creating illiterate students screams "WE'RE FAILING!" to me. So many of us in this class, and in classrooms in general, work hard to provide our students with a clear understanding of what literature, composition, and communication in general are that to say that not including technology is doing such a great disservice to them bothers me. I agree that more technology needs to be included in the classroom but to take the weight away from the understanding and working with printed text will be doing an even greater disservice. I think we all agree that our students our technologically capable and that helping them grow in those skills is something we all welcome, yet not at the expense of relinquishing the gift of composing an essay or debating a text that can make an individual or a class grow both intellectually and personally.
Teaching Web Literacy: A New Responsibility
Kajder’s Chapter 5 on navigating the web while doing research was the first of the articles of the course so far that didn’t by its subject urge me right away to think about how I teach my own classes, since I’ve never really asked students to do serious research on the web. I’ve never assigned a research paper in fact. (Sophomore English students do research when writing their essays for the persuasive speech unit, but freshman teachers aren’t encumbered with this job.) Lately, with WebQuests, I’ve been thinking about using the web for guided research, but the guided nature of the activity presumes of course that students aren’t going to asked to dive in on their own. So one question that has come up is, Should I be requiring some level of web research in my course, to strengthen students’ web resourcefulness and savvy, or should I let this area of scholarship be left to the history department (and sophomore English teachers), which yearly requires students to write research papers. (Now whether all history teachers require, or allow, web research, I don’t know, but I am sure that at least one of my colleagues has gone far enough as to disallow public web research for history papers precisely because he has found the sources’ credibility so unpredictable.) But the Kinzer and McEneaney articles suggest that the English teacher’s role in developing web literacy has less to do with skill in pursuing research needs and more to do with the evolving nature of reading itself.
It’s the responsibility for teaching this new shape of literacy that I accept as an English teacher, even if, to be frank, I don’t yet understand its distinction from normal literacy. When I’ve had trouble steering my way through, say, Hamlet websites, and found myself lost after three or four links away from the original site, or when I had known that when I stayed with the best Catcher in the Rye site after several hits, I was only stopping at the first adequate one—I just assumed that this was a reflection of lack of speed or skill and not a fundamental problem with reading the web. It takes time, I thought—I’ll get it. But there are tricks and skills of course to getting what you need more quickly—from, as Kajder’s article shows, choosing the right search engines and the best keywords to finding articles on the Deep Web—that I am beginning to see as a valuable area of study for the English classroom.
One very interesting thing that comes from the McEneany article is the presentation of various ways of reading the same article. Unfortunately, my browser did not let me see the “path” version of the article, but I could clearly envision the difference between viewing an article as a path and working one’s way through the hypertext, which is still a very confusing process for me. The hypertext method of reading still seems to be a scattered and difficult—personalized, yes—means of working through an established idea that courses through an essay or presentation. My old-fashioned preference is still for the hard-copy word document version, although, for the McEneany article, I settled for the Adobe version as a gesture to saving paper.
So where does this put me as classes begin in the fall? I think assigning some sort of small research project, either on authors or on themes related to the works studied, seems a good place to begin embracing this new teaching role. In addition, I would like to look at the availability of literary criticism on the web, not only from JSTOR on the Deep Web (which I have not used in the classroom), but from the public web itself to try to collectively distinguish respectable from specious scholarship, which to me seems at the heart of this emerging form of literacy.
It’s the responsibility for teaching this new shape of literacy that I accept as an English teacher, even if, to be frank, I don’t yet understand its distinction from normal literacy. When I’ve had trouble steering my way through, say, Hamlet websites, and found myself lost after three or four links away from the original site, or when I had known that when I stayed with the best Catcher in the Rye site after several hits, I was only stopping at the first adequate one—I just assumed that this was a reflection of lack of speed or skill and not a fundamental problem with reading the web. It takes time, I thought—I’ll get it. But there are tricks and skills of course to getting what you need more quickly—from, as Kajder’s article shows, choosing the right search engines and the best keywords to finding articles on the Deep Web—that I am beginning to see as a valuable area of study for the English classroom.
One very interesting thing that comes from the McEneany article is the presentation of various ways of reading the same article. Unfortunately, my browser did not let me see the “path” version of the article, but I could clearly envision the difference between viewing an article as a path and working one’s way through the hypertext, which is still a very confusing process for me. The hypertext method of reading still seems to be a scattered and difficult—personalized, yes—means of working through an established idea that courses through an essay or presentation. My old-fashioned preference is still for the hard-copy word document version, although, for the McEneany article, I settled for the Adobe version as a gesture to saving paper.
So where does this put me as classes begin in the fall? I think assigning some sort of small research project, either on authors or on themes related to the works studied, seems a good place to begin embracing this new teaching role. In addition, I would like to look at the availability of literary criticism on the web, not only from JSTOR on the Deep Web (which I have not used in the classroom), but from the public web itself to try to collectively distinguish respectable from specious scholarship, which to me seems at the heart of this emerging form of literacy.
Critical use of internet resources
Some general thoughts:
Yes, students absolutely need to be taught to question the validity and perspective of things online as much as they do anywhere else. I still firmly believe that a broad emphasis on critical thinking/reading will pay large dividends. That doesn’t mean not to focus it on specifics like websites of course. Before I wised up to it I had students saying in a PowerPoint that
I agree that a lot of what we read sounds dated, which emphasizes the importance of the skills we want students to develop over the content. Right now we live in a google-centric world, but it seems likely that google will continue to evolve and/or something else will come along. The point is, five years ago teaching students how AltaVista and Yahoo and Google searched differently was important, now it’s not. What is important is that students find out how these resources do their work.
Likewise, the process of searching for good relevant information is important. One point I’m not sure Kajder emphasizes (enough) is the importance of students knowing what they are looking for. Most of the websites that are easy to find on Othello or Animal Farm are in the SparkNotes mold (more on that later) and will be summaries, possibly with analysis and basic background information. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that sending students to find summaries of literature isn’t the best use of the internet.
Assuming that students do know what they are searching for, it’s important to give them some basic practice with things like Boolean operators which will become even more important as they continue their studies (try putting “Shakespeare” into JSTOR, see how useful that is). Searches work so quickly now that knowing how to do some trial and error searches seems like the skill worth developing, as is knowing how to interpret those results. (As a side note, tabbed browsing is one of the greatest things to ever happen to me. You (or students) can just open a new tab, you never need to leave the search results page.)
Our library does a brief orientation for freshmen where they teach them the basics of the library, how to search the online catalogue, where reference books are, etc. One thing they don’t bother with is teaching students about some of the online resources we have. The school subscribes to a student-friendly version of Infotrac and a few resources like that. I haven’t looked extensively at all of these resources, but I do know that they’re intended for high school scholarship, which is more than I can say for SparkNotes.
The hypertext version of the McEnearney article utilizes much of the potential of hypertext as a medium. The setup actively encourages a reading that isn’t necessarily linear. I admire how much he goes out of his way to provide a format that isn’t a simple reproduction of the article (although he puts that up as well) and lets users choose their own path. Checking how the reader is doing so far and including a discussion forum are at the very least productive uses of a website.
Finally, I want to weigh in on SparkNotes. 95% of the time (no, that’s not based on actual scientific research) students use sites like that as a shortcut and nothing more. I don’t believe they have no merit, they just aren’t usually used to deepen understanding. One thing that feeds into our conversation is that students don’t recognize that SparkNotes is not directed at high school readers nor is it directed at people who don’t read the text and think critically about it. It can be helpful as a supplement to reading and interpretation, but fails miserably for anyone who relies on SparkNotes as a substitute for either of those. I generally check out what’s on there for anything I’m teaching both to get ideas and to try to be aware when students are using it. The quality I’ve found is pretty variable. Sometimes the focus is incredibly narrow (ie 1984 is all about Winston’s fatalism – what?!) or they give away the ending in the chapter 1 summary. The point is, I know and recognize that SparkNotes has a useful application, I just don’t believe my, or most, students use it for that purpose.
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