How Does the Search Process Support Inquiry Learning?

2 ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS How does the search process support inquiry learning? What are the best instructional strategies to teach the search process? Which search engines best support students' searching and exploration? Searching the Web 23 Alisha slips off her iPod earbuds and sits down at the computer; she has about 15 minutes before she meets with her team. She's thinking about their last meeting when they brainstormed questions and discussed what they each knew about the topic. She pulls up the Research Wiki set up by Mr. Rodriquez, her teacher-librarian. He always uses a wiki so kids can work collaboratively in identifying the best search tools. A few of the search engines peak her interest as she scans the annotated list; she clicks on Quintura to see how the tag cloud is used. As she watches the screencast, she opens another window and follows along experimenting with different keywords. Satisfied that she has mastered the new search engine, she returns to Google remem bering a strategy Mr. Rodriquez recommended at the class research session- "type define: search term" to get definitions. She uses Google all the time but did not realize that it had advanced searching strategies. Cool, it worked! She scans the list of 20 or more definitions of global warming, looking at the URLs. She tags the Web page in her shared del.icio. us account to share with her teammates. She moves to another search tool, Ask.com. When the class was comparing search engines, she noticed that Ask.com had a great results page-it gave listings of videos and up-to-date news on the search term and offered suggestions to narrow and broaden the search. She clicks on "Ways to Stop Global Warming" and "News" and gets an annotated list of world news stories. Her eyes go to the lower side of the screen where she sees a listing of RSS news feeds for "Top Stories/' "World/' "United States/' "Science/' etc. Great, she thinks to herself ''I'm going to suggest that the team set up some news feeds on our global warming wiki. Why spend time searching for the information when it can come to you?" She makes a mental note to add that to the research wiki to alert other students to this feature. This will be a good start for her team. Before she leaves, she quickly reviews what she has gathered: definitions, videos, suggestions to narrow their search, related terms, and news feeds. Not bad for 20 minutes work, this will help her team focus their In addition to being the most popular search engine, Google topic and decide on the has a number of other great services that educators can use to essential questions they support student learning: Google Alert is an e-mail update service of the latest relevant want to investigate. With Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query two minutes to spare, she or topic. checks her e-mail. Google Docs is a free Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations that allow you share and collaborate online. iGoogle is a start page tool where you can aggregate all the How Has Searching Google resources you use on your online desktop, e.g., Mail, Develop ed? Google Calendar.... Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and The first Web site, created on blogs for new content and posts them to one easy page. August 6, 199 t by Tim Berners GMail is a free e-mail service that integrates with Google's other Lee, was also the fir t Web services. directory since he kept an ever Google Apps is a free communication, collaboration, and publish growing, categorized list of ing tools, including e-mail accounts on your school's domain (like [email protected]). Web sites that other peop le created. It became the WWW Virtual Library (http://vlib.org). Figure 2.2. Google: Not Just a Search Engine. 24 Choosing Web 2.0 Tools If Only Search engInes Could Understand What We Want In 1994, there were fewer than 10,000 Web sites, but by 1998, it had grown to approximately 3.5 million Web sites. Google, the search engin e with the goofy name and a new algo rithm that produced results that were more useful, was launched and took the largest sh,u:e of the search engine mar ket very quickly. Google now commands 60 percent of all searches worldwide. Yahoo! is a distant second with 14 per cen t and MSM Live is third Figure 2.3. YouTube Video "IfOnly Search Engines Could Understand with 4 percent of the market. What We Want" (http: //www.youtube.com/ w atch?v=qOBfp4URgWQ). Show this brief video to students as a conversation starter. Are their (You know a search engine is experiences using search engines similar? very popular when its name becomes a verb-Google it!) The idea of Web searching has been around for as long as the Internet itself, but only in the past several years did it catch on with the mainstream. Now, it is the sec ond most popular activity online, after e-mail (Pew In ternet). But things change quickly on the Web and if you think Google will always be leader of the pack, think again; history shows how quickly search engines users become fickle. Alta Vista was the favorite home page in 1995 due to its index that offered lightning fasts results, but it was quickly replaced by Google, who not only indexed Web pages but ranked pages by who linked to it. Luckily, there is always pressure to create the latest and the best search engine to capture the highest revenue. Using the latest and most innovative technologies, search engine companies are continuously competing to develop the best search engine. It's not surprising that many of the search engines being developed have unique features based on Web 2.0 characteristics. We don't often think of search engines as being Web 2.0 tools since they are not new technol ogies but recent changes and updates have brought about customization, social search capabilities, and expanded content. This aligns with Web 2.0' s characteristics that emphasize participation, publication, socialization, and sharing. Student Information Seeking Behavior Before we look at the search process, we need to look at our primary users, students. The ubiquitous nature of the Web and Google gives students an inflated sense of their abil ities when it comes to conducting online research. Just ask any student if they need help and they will say, "No, I'm fine" or "I'll just Google." Kathleen Tyner in her book Literacy in a Digital World categorizes literacies into two groups- toolliteracies which encompass computer, network, and technology; and literacies of representation that include informa tion, visual, and media. Kids often fool their teachers and sometimes themselves into think ing they are digitally literate because they have strong "tool" or computer skills; however, Searching the Web 25 they often lack "literacies of representation"-information literacy (Tyner 1998,94). The two are very distinct and different skills. Students expect a search engine to deliver accurate, analyzed answers, but it rarely, if ever, does. But even though students overrate their searching abilities and expect too much from the search engines, they are usually satisfied with their results; what they find is usually "good enough." Research shows that 93 percent of young people are sat isfied or very satisfied with their overall experience of using a search engine. However, research also tells us 72.3 percent of search engines users experience"search engine fatigue" either "always," "usually," or "sometimes" when researching a topic on the Internet (Sterling 2007). The report discusses user frustration with clutter and the content of search results: "When asked to name their #1 complaint about the process, 25 percent cited a deluge of results, 24 percent cited a predominance of commercial (paid) listings, 18.8 percent blamed the search engine's inability to understand their keywords (forcing them to try again), and 18.6 percent were most frustrated by disorganized/random results." There was also a desire among many users that search engines be able to read their minds. "The survey respondents were asked whether they wished that search engines like Google could, in effect, read their minds, delivering the results they were actually looking for .... That capability is something that 78 percent of all survey-takers 'wished' for, including 86.2 percent of 18-34 year-olds and 85 percent of those under 18." Although search engines can't read our minds, yet, innovation in the search industry is picking up. What we think of as "search" has expanded substantially in the last few years largely due to the new type of services offered and content that is ( available. Because of all the 5 recent advancemen ts in search ;, engine development, it's diffi d cult to categorize search engines ti into neat group s with specific it features and cap abilities since o most overlap in differen t ways. s Instead, what w have done in t this chapter is to group them into strategies that highbght their capability to help students be successful searchers and to make sense of the information they are finding. How D oes the Search Process Support Inquiry Learning? All of you, unfortunately, are faced with students doing topic research, such as a fi ve-p age Investigate paper on China or a PowerPoint presentation on the state bird. Figure 2.4. Stripling Inquiry Model. 26 Choosing Web 2.0 Tools The emphasis is on finding facts and cutting and pasting bits of information into some type of report with little real learning taking place.

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