EasyBib: Almost in Your Firefox Toolbar

(Yeah, yeah. I get the irony here.)

I had an email from EasyBib in my inbox today  (Ahem!).

Students can now cite websites directly from Firefox.  Cool idea, but there are still a few kinks to work out.

It's a quick add-on, but took me a minute to find once I added it.

Here's where EasyBib's photos say it shows up.

Here's where I found it.  But maybe Evernote is forcing it to move.

Once I found it, it was pretty slick, at first.  Here's what is supposed to happen.

You click on the icon, a box pops up that allows you to select the project for your citation
Select the appropriate project and click "Cite on Easy Bib."

A new box pops up with the familiar citation interface, allowing you to add dates and verify the information.  Click "Create" and Bob's your uncle, as our British cousins say, and the citation adds to selected Bibliography.

Sort of.

It worked the first time I tried it--but pretty much hasn't on multiple repeat tries. Here are the problems:

1.   After the initial try, it hasn't let me select my project.  The box opens, and the menu pops up, but then it closes when I click.  When I reopen the box, the same project shows.  I tried this at least seven times, with the same results. 

2.  Finally, I just  clicked "Cite on Easy Bib." Instead of the page to adjust information, it took me straight to this:

Of course, when I went to EasyBib to check the bibliography, nothing was there.  Again, repeatedly.  I thought my browser might be outdated, but it's the current version--19.0.2

So, I'm sorry to say, this is a great idea that's not quite ready to pass on to the students.  I hope they keep working on it.


UPDATE:  I've been playing with it off and on, because I REALLY want this to work!  While I still can't get it to let me select different projects, at least the citation screen started working (see below).  While the citation defaults to websites, you can change the citation type once it pops up, and manually add the other info.

By the Numbers: Infographics, cont.

Are you growing tired of Infographics yet?

We've finished round one of the Infographic Project, with lots of interesting feedback.
You'll see student samples throughout this post--the best of the lot; most of them, quite frankly, didn't quite get it, for reasons I'll discuss below. In a nutshell, we deemed the assignment well worth another go, and feel students will do a better job the second time around.

The assignment was for students to choose a specific tourist destination such as EuroDisney or Hurghada, Egypt, and show how the site fit into the Butler Model of tourism.  As it turns out, that probably wasn't the best assignment for this type of project, as the research aspect was really difficult. Very hard to find specific data on that.  Another group is working on Chinese migration, and that is FAR easier, as it's far more numbers-based and data-driven.

Here's how we rolled out the assignment.

Day One:  The history teacher introduced the assignment, explained the Butler model and looked at examples of it.

Day Two:  I introduced the students to infographics using this pathfinder.  They spent 15-20 minutes exploring the various infographic collections in small groups, generating lists of the different elements making up an infographic. Student were instructed to consider both content and design. Then, as a large group, we brainstormed a pretty comprehensive list of what goes in to designing an infographic.

Following this, student took 10-15 minutes to skim through the infographic design articles.  We then took our list of elements, and came up with some "rules" for good infographic design.

Using Twiddla, I loaded a sample of a not-so-great infographic and had them  evaluate it using our criteria.

Finally, we talked about the specific research problems they might face--finding hard data, and discussed strategies for that.

Day Three:  After a quick tour of Easel.ly, students spent time researching. I chose Easel.ly (rather than PiktoChart) because it offered more graphic options, and seemed pretty straight forward.  But I also made a point of mentioning students were free to hand-draw their infographic if they were so inclined, or use other programs.

After that they had a weekend, and their drafts were due on Tuesday.  I wasn't around for that, as I had other obligations, but they did some peer feedback before turning in their final copies on Thursday.

I came into the class that day to do  what turned out to be a very interesting whole-class discussion for feedback on what worked and what didn't.  (Easel.ly, I hope you're listening!)

1.  Students had problems working with Easel.ly, and some switched to Piktochart, others just used Pages, Apple's graphics oriented word processing software (Just as a point of info, I only use Word if I have to these days. Almost everything I write/design is in Pages.)
Their issues revolved around:

• Working with text (I struggled with this, too). It is just CLUNKY and limited. PiktoChart, on the other hand, has great customization for text.
• They also had big problems with the autosave not working. Several students lost work, and one had to redo his six times.
• Limited canvas size--there's only the one. And limited customization. PiktoChart lets you set your own canvas size, and is generally for more customizable.
• Students wanted to the ability to flip icons, which you can currently do.

On the positive, it offers a more extensive (and better designed) collection thematic templates than PiktoChart. It also offers a better collection of graphics than PiktoChart, though the latter has improved on this from when I first considered it as a tool.

Aside from tool issues, we also asked them about the assignment itself, and this is where it got really interesting. Students had mixed responses, with some enjoying the assignment and others less enthusiastic, shall we say.

When we specifically asked whether they would rather do an infographic or a Power Point presentation, for those who chose the latter, it was specifically because they thought it was easier. As one student commented, "I don't have to think about a Power Point, I just put everything on it."

Which is where I got excited.  Across the board, whether they liked it or not, students gave the same reason:  I had to think about this assignment differently.  I had to be selective about the information I chose to use (see the video interview below). Students were either excited by the challenge or resistant to the extra mental effort.

That, I think, is the power behind infographics, and why we plan to use them again.  Generally,  when students research, it's about quantity rather than quality, as any English or History teacher can tell you.  Students take everything they know, throw it into the paper and hope something sticks.  With an infographic, they can't do that. An infographic forces them to

1. Condense their argument or "story" down to its bare elements
2. Select the very best evidence to support that argument, then
3. Display that argument visually.

Heck, I struggled with this--and precisely because it's a very different way of thinking for verbally-oriented, English teacher me.  But in this increasingly visual world, students MUST be comfortable with not only analyzing media, but with creating well-designed, graphic-based media themselves.

So, for a first effort, we're very pleased with the results, and the students' thoughtful self-reflection. We believe, as with most endeavors, students will improve with practice as they grow more fluent in (and comfortable with) their visual thinking.

BTW:  I forgot to add--one thing we didn't do, and really should have,  was have a day in class to sketch-up a draft, and get feedback both from us (the teachers) and their peers.  We did this informally, but we should have talked more specifically about design and layout once they were ready to start creating.  We'll definitely add this in next time.

The Research Planner, 2011 Style

I re-designed the Research Planner I use with the kids.  I'm torn on this--the older students tend to ignore it, to be honest.  Which is understandable, I suppose.  I mean, I know I don't sit down and plan out all of those when I am seriously searching.  Do any of you?  So how realistic are we really being in asking them to do this?

On the other hand, I already know all of this, and am able to "do it on the fly," as it were.  Maybe the whole point is to force encourage students to do it enough, that thinking about all of this becomes embedded in their practice.  I'm more insistent/persistent with the middle-schoolers about actually writing down book titles, etc.  With the older students it's more of a reminder:  "Hey, you need to think about this!"  

UPDATE:  It just occurred to me (in one of those "Duh!" kind of moments!), that I uploaded the PDF, which isn't editable, making it hard to change the databases section to reflect your own! If you want to edit the file, use PDF to Word to convert it. Or, if you're a Pages user, just leave your email address in the comments section, and I'll email you the document.

Research Planner

Content Curation and the Multi-Genre, Connected Search

 Hmm...I'm sure if I'd tried a bit harder, I could have loaded more buzz words into that title!

I've been thinking a lot about searching the past few weeks.  First, my DP students (grade 11) are just leaving the Pre-Search phase of their extended essays, and we're starting to talk about finding/managing sources.  I'm also putting together a presentation on Information Dashboards that I hope will be selected for the EARCOS conference this spring.

If you read Joyce or Buffy at all, or just about any other library blogger/site, you know that "Curation" is the buzz word du jour.  I pooh-poohed it for quite a while, thinking it was just a trendy name for what librarians (and researching students) have always done: collect sources and gather information.  Then I had my own little Eureka! moment: Collectors do just that: collect.  Curators, however, collect content as the initial stage in telling a story about the material collected (as in the best museums). In other words, curators put what they collect into context.

I'm trying to fit that new way of thinking about search into the kinds of skills and tools I teach the students.  I had a "take that" moment last Friday, when I asked a couple students if I could get screen shots of their Information Dashboards, Evernote collections, etc. for my presentation.  They looked a bit shame-faced, then admitted they hadn't really used them, it had just been "easier" to load everything into a Word document.  AARGGH!

I see that result partly as the nature of our workshops--I have to teach some of these things before the students are heavily into research, so I'm not there to reinforce using the skills/tools once they actually NEED them, and they fall back into old (bad?) habits. I need to address that problem directly with the students. Maybe give them time to brainstorm as a group just how they can use these tools productively.

More importantly, while I teach the tools and strategies, I don't think I've been teaching the "search mindset" epecially well.  Doug Johnson wrote a post today asking how professionals learn to search.  The thing is, aside from a few tricks in the "advanced search" feature such as narrowing domains, etc. I don't do anything that different from the rest of our faculty--or students-- though I think of myself as a reasonably good searcher.  What IS different is how I approach a search task, and knowing where to look for information, beyond "just Googling it."

In other words, searching today is multi-genre, and that's where curation, and curation tools, come in.

Gone are the days when I instructed students to "start with the books."  I still encourage them to use them, of course, but depending on their topic (and my somewhat slim collection), that's often NOT the best place to start.

So I've decided to revamp how I approach teaching search strategies this year.

1) It's Not About The Tools:  I'll start with the appropriate search attitude. I've glossed on this with them--the usual "don't give up if it's not in the first page of results" sort of thing--but I need a more specific list of what good searching behavior looks like.  More on this in later posts, but the point is, I need to emphasize this much more than I do.  Being a tech-geek, I have too much tendency to focus on the tools, and this is a big mistake:  the tools are changing faster than we can learn to use them.

2)  Sometimes, It Is About the Tools: I used to think it was important to limit students' exposure to tools--that part of my job was determining which the best ones were for their task, and sharing only those.  Now, I'm not so sure, and this brilliant blog post cemented my thinking. Money quote:

Every place they go, people will be using a flood of differing devices. Every place they work people will be Skyping, Twittering, Chatting, Texting, working together in Google Docs, translating, searching for information and data, and building social networks. If they are not learning the best ways to do all this, your school is a failure, because your students will lack essential knowledge and social skills. (Key: If you can walk into a classroom and see a bunch of kids doing the same thing in the same way on the same device, you still have a 19th Century school.)

Thus, while we still need to winnow the list of resources down--students don't need 20 different curation tools--I need to offer the older students at least a variety of options, allowing them to choose the tools that best fit their needs and learning style.

In the past, we created dashboards with either iGoogle (my favorite) or NetVibes, then documented their research in EverNote and BibMe.   Younger students use NoodleTools, but I wanted to wean them away from those subscription-based applications to apps they would available to them in the "real world."

In the Dashboard, their main page was personal, then they created tabs for their topics. I think I will still have them create a personal tab, and page in which to embed their paper (Google Docs), database feeds, etc.  but now they will have the option to collect their other sources in Scoop.It or LiveBinder.   I thought about Paper.li, but it looks like it only "plays" with Twitter and Facebook.  Or am I missing something?

3)  The Shifting Nature of Authority:  Ten years ago, would you ever have let a student cite a blog post in an academic paper?  Now, I not only encourage them to, I think I'm going to "require" it. As part of their research, I want students to follow at least one expert on their topic, through both his/her blog and Twitter feed.  I will also have them follow appropriate hashtags in Twitter for resources.  Basically, I want to instill the idea of connectedness and collaboration into their searching by asking them to create a PLN, and we will talk about that as part of their research strategy/attitude. 

This should also be a great point for discussing the shifting nature of authority in the digital world, and the increased need for triangulating information.  I also think we need to get away from the idea that bias is bad.  In the early days everything I read claimed the Web was bad because it was full of 'Opinion."  The horror! The horror!   It's more important to teach students to recognize opinion, acknowledge it as such, then determine where that opinion fits into the rest of their findings and their own learning.

5) Beyond Web Portals: I used to talk to students about starting with web portals and content-specific search engines. It's still good for them to know about those, but they're almost a Web 1.0 construct, aren't they?    In addition to searching Twitter,  and Del.icio.us, students should also be searching the very tools they're using--Scoop.It, Paper.li, LiveBinder and even Lib Guides for pre-curated content. They know to search YouTube and even Vimeo, but what about TeacherTube, iTunes U, Big Think, TED, Information Is Beautiful and similar sites that tend not to come up high in the Google results?   I think I'll create a list of site-specific links for them to include in their general search pattern.

4.  We will continue to use EverNote as the storehouse for their notes, final list of resources, etc.

I'm going to create a new set of slides and handouts for this, which I will post.

In the meantime, please add your own thoughts, ideas or suggestions in the comments. 

And here is the Scoop.It  I created on curation and tools, if you want to see what I've been reading.

Content Curation and the Research Story

I am late in jumping on the "curation" bandwagon.  I didn't get it, and thought it was just a trendy, jargon word for what librarians have always done.  Then I ran across a definition (which, unfortunately, I neither bookmarked, nor saved to de.licio.us,  Instapaper,  or Evernote, so cannot find now) that fomented one of those Eureka! moments for me.  Roughly paraphrased:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/umjanedoan/497411169/in/photostream

Collectors do just that: collect.  Curators, however, collect content as the initial stage in telling a story about the material collected (as in the best museums). In other words, curators put what they collect into context.

Wow! That resonated for me because, of course, that is what teachers ask students to do every time they assign a (well-designed!) research project.    And one of our most difficult jobs as information specialists is helping students not just make sense of their findings, but of fitting them into the larger context of the story they're trying to tell.  They may find a great YouTube video on the conflict in the Congo, but what does it add to their presentation on colonialism's aftermath? What nuance does it add to their thesis?  How does it relate to their other sources? Does it detract in any way and, if so, how do they account for it within the context of their overall point or "story"?

These are big, big questions.

Then I ran across this article this morning, describing journalism's own struggle with creating a coherent story from the plethora of info-babble and Twitter feeds.  If journalists--often our students' source--find this difficult, how much harder must it be for a 15-year-old? 

More importantly, how can we guide them in their story-telling without influencing their interpretations, or adding to what is already an over-whelming burden for many of them?


Students as Curators  

First, I think we need to explain their research to them in exactly these terms, including the museum analogy (or any other analogy you think will be relevant for them).    Students need to understand they are not just bookmarking ad nauseum, but trying to create a larger story.

Second, as students work with their sources, we should encourage (require?) them to jot down their ideas on  the source's relevance to their larger research "story."  Nothing as formal and time-consuming as an annotated bibliography, though I think those are a great way of a) forcing students to think more deeply about their source and b) ensuring they've actually read it, and aren't just including it to pad out their Works Cited  (Surely not!). 

While I would love to ask students to do these regularly, they are a lot of work, and I think there would be quite a bit of understandable push-back.  I'm a firm believer in choosing my battles!  It makes more sense to me to just ask them  to write quick ideas on their note-cards (real or digital).

Since many students don't have a clear idea of their thesis during the initial research stages, this would be an ongoing task, and their process in that (not the actual notes themselves) should be part of my assessment of their research.  Moreover, as they share their research notes with me, I would of course  nudge and guide their progress.  It's far more important to work with them during the process, than evaluate them after-the-fact!

Organizing Research: Tools for Participatory Learning

I may or may not have said that I'm teaching a 10th grade English class next year, in addition to running the library.  Aside from the fact that I do miss teaching English (though not the paper load!), I'm especially excited as I now have a built-in group on which to use all these tech tools I've been blogging about the past 5 years, without having to beg a teacher to "loan" me their class.

More importantly, it's the 10th graders.  We are an IB school, and 9th/10th graders spend a large part of those two years researching a personal project.  Obviously, I help with that, but it's been difficult to get their main advisor to give me the amount of time I think we need to spend on getting them organized and thinking about research in the right way.    And now I have them!

I'm fairly certain I can justify spending time helping them with their PP research as part of the English 10 curriculum--literacy is literacy, right?

We introduced the project to them (as 9th graders) about 6 weeks ago, but I only had two days with them, which we spent trying to set up their information dashboard on NetVibes.  Along with lots of tech glitches.  Of course.

Rather like Buffy Hamilton's Media 21 class, I  want to teach them to embed meaningful technology, create a PLN,  and to engage in participatory learning.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the tools.  Especially for us technophiles, it's all-too-easy to overwhelm students with the number of apps we ask them to use.  I also believe firmly in using real-life applications.  For example, while I have the 6-8's using NoodleTools in order to instill the idea of citations and notecards, I want to move the older students away from that to tools they can actually use on their own once they leave high school.

GATHERING INFO:

One of the students' biggest problems when researching is organizing their resources. They bookmark everything (which causes problems when they try to bookmark a database article), never tag, and it's a mess to try to find a specific article.  That's one reason I've never been a huge fan of using De.licio.us.    Enter the information dashboard.  Students use Netvibes or iGoogle (my favorite) to gather and organize their information. On both apps, thanks to tabs, they can create different pages on the same site.  I suggest the following:


HOME:   This is their landing page, and it should be both fun and functional for them.  I ask them to include links to the library website database page, our Google Apps account (with iGoogle, they can embed their actual document) a to-do list, InstaPaper, EverNote and Bibme.org.   They should also include note-taking and to-do list widgets.  After that, they can add whatever (appropriately!) takes their fancy to make the page their own.

I also ask them to find at least two experts who are blogging on their topic/issue, and include feeds for them, encouraging them to post comments/questions on the blog.

TABS: While I don't tell them what tabs to create--since each student has a different project, hence unique needs--we do talk about various ways to organize their information. As an example, imagine a project where a student wants to create a documentary about homelessness in Mongolia.  Students must not only research the topic, but also how to create the documentary.

They could organize their information by subject, with a tab each for homelessness, Mongolia, and effective documentary techniques.

Or they could organize by material type, with tabs for database articles, news feeds, videos, etc.  Most of our databases allow students to create RSS feeds of their searches, and they include those, too.

Or they could use some combination of the two.  The point is, students think seriously about what makes the most sense to their topic and their own learning style.

InstaPaper and EverNote

I wrestled quite a while with whether or not to have students use these.  After all, can't they just include links to articles or website on their dashboard?   The hard reality, however, is that students find so many text resources, it becomes somewhat cumbersome to keep adding them to their dashboard. Moreover, they don't always have time to read something right away, to see whether it's "dashboard worthy." Thus, we use the dashboard for feeds, large websites, videos, etc.  But InstaPaper and EverNote for articles and one page websites.

InstaPaper is a great place to store online text for later perusal.  Better yet, it does a great job of stripping all the extraneous (distracting!) material.  They can then share the articles they like with their EverNote account, which does a horrible job of saving webpages (it keeps a lot of the junk), but is much better than InstaPaper for organizing, tagging, etc.




 

The Prodigal Blogger Returns, Along with iPhone Citations

Well......so much for my Christmas blogging blitz!  I have just not been motivated to blog the past few months.  I'd have an idea for a post or learn something new, but couldn't be bothered to actually write it down and share.  Not good.  Mea culpa.  I suspect if you search that term on the blog, it would pop up several times; I'm definitely a go-through-phases poster, which is only the least reason among many while I'll never be a Doug or a Buffy or a Joyce.

Anyway, I am currently escaping from the end of the Mongolian winter and luxuriating in a 5 star hotel in Borneo,  attending EARCOS, the big conference for Asian international schools.  I'm doing a short workshop tomorrow on Animoto booktrailers, which I've written about previously here, so I won't do it again!  

I'm attending other workshops, though, and have fodder for much online thought, in addition to planning and running Literacy Week at the school a few weeks ago, so I'll post all my stuff on that once I'm back.

In the meantime, here's a nifty little iPhone app I learned about yesterday:  Quick Cite
It's a 99 cents app wherein you basically take a picture of a book's barcode, and it emails you the citation. You can choose among several formats: MLA, APA, etc.  and they have plans to integrate with EndNote--f any of you are using that--in the next few days.

I'm excited about this.  Like most schools, ours "officially" tells students they can't use their phones, but let's be realistic about it.  I ignore that most of the time (as do the students!), and love pointing out ways they can use their smartphones for something other than texting!  In fact, I'd argue we have an obligation to do that, but not everyone agrees.

That's it for now--I'm off to the Bornean forests to view the Orangutans!  I attended a workshop yesterday on QR Codes, so will post my thoughts on those tomorrow. (I know, I know:  you've heard THAT before! )

I Think I've Got It!

I blogged a while back about being determined to figure out Prezi.   Judge the results for yourself:

Research/Pre-Search on Prezi

Now that I have the basics, I will work on finesse!

Research: It's All About the Questions

I've been working on updating my research curriculum, starting with the handout, which was just a lot of boring text.  Face it, if it's not visually interesting, kids won't bother reading it.

More importantly, however, I wanted to refocus the lessons to put more emphasis on questioning strategies.  After three years of walking 6th-12th graders through the process (I used a modified Big 6), I realized many of the problem students encountered were a result of poor questioning skills (which may in itself may result from a lack of critical thinking. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?).

I realize Big 6 is the go-to model for the research process; it's touted as focusing on problem solving as opposed to "report writing," which is great.  However, whether it's the language describing the tasks or just the way it gets used, I feel the "problem solving" aspect gets buried and the whole process becomes too goal oriented:  Write your thesis, find the info, there you go!

Real research geared around real questions is a lot more messy, and I wanted something that kept the basic structure, but focused more on questioning strategies throughout the process.  Jame MacKenzie's
Questioning Toolkit was a good jumping off point, and I embedded some of his ideas into the Big 6 structure.  His article on The Research Cycle also informed much of my thinking on this.

I'm finishing up handouts on notetaking, plagiarism/citations and working with primary sources, which I'll also post.

As always, I'd love to hear any feedback, thoughts, critiques, etc!

Research Packet

The Connected Student

My new school is an IB world school, offering a full IB program, elementary through secondary.  Part of what that means for the library is that the 9th/10th graders and 11th/12 graders each have extended (around 4000 words) research projects/papers to write.  I've been working the past week on revising my research approach, with a nod to Buffy Hamilton's Media21 Project, as well as my interview a few months ago with Michelle Luhtala.

Specifically, I want to make social media an embedded part of what students do. I have said before that "digital natives" aren't all that adept at analytical uses of social tools; these will become a key component of the 14 weeks I work directly with the students.  I also want to adapt the Big 6 model, building in some components of Jamie MacKenzie's questioning model.  IB does a great job of pushing beyond standard essay topics into true, exploratory, inquiry-based types of projects.  Students have a difficult time framing good questions, however, so I will build in more instruction on that.

While I wanted them to keep a process blog, the coordinator put a nix on that as too much extra work not directly related to the extended essay, and he has a point; I will watch how it goes this year, though. I think keeping a reflective blog of their thoughts and processes would

• inform their essay
• provide them insight into their own learning style/process
• add positively to their digital footprint
• be a source for connecting with experts as they create their PLN

DIGITAL TOOLS

I will incorporate the following tools for student use:

iGOOGLE:   Buffy used NetVibes to create student learning portals, but I decided to use iGoogle because it more directly links to each student and the Google apps, while still allowing them to embed resources, RSS feeds and other tools via the gadgets, and to create different tabs/pages by subject.  This allows students to create highly individualized collections of up-to-the minute information.

I'll have them create at least two tabs:  The first will be general organizational info, and their own "fun" stuff: A to-do list, an embedded calendar of due dates, links to important school-related sites, pathfinders, etc.   The second will be their collection of resources, RSS feeds, associated documents, etc.

EVERNOTE:  For gathering online sources, taking notes, sharing bookmarks.

NOODLETOOLS:  For notetaking, citations.

GOOGLE DOCS:  While the nature of the extended essay (each student researches their own topic) doesn't allow for much collaboration, I'll show them the tools, as Google Forms will be useful for students needing to do surveys.    I'll demonstrate the collaborative nature of a Google doc when I have them practice paraphrasing/summarizing as a group.  I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out a way to incorporate Google Docs or wikis into this. If you have any ideas, please post them in the comments!

Obviously, it would be easier for them to share their progress with their advisors if they do all their planning/writing on Google Docs.  I'm not sure if I can ask advisors to create Google accounts just for this.  I am starting to push for the school to adopt Google Apps for Education, but that will take a while.  I'm having a meeting with the head of secondary and the two coordinators, so will definitely bring this up.

RSS FEEDS:  For gathering data, following expert blogs on their topics, etc.  I'm looking into Yahoo Pipes which, as far as I can tell, allows users to aggregate different feeds into one. I'm trying to decide if I want to talk to them about Twitter searches/feeds.  I think I'll do that on an individual basis, depending on their topic and whether I think it would be a valuable resource or not.

One thing I have to be careful about is not overwhelming them with tools.  This seems like a good start, especially for students who have never really had formal training in doing research.

I'm pretty excited about how we have decided to run this, since the entire project is outside their regular course work.  I will offer twice-a-week workshops over a course of 14-15 weeks.  Students will sign up for one of the workshops, and we'll keep track of who attends to ensure they actually get the information.  I can give individual lessons to students who can't fit in otherwise and--you guessed it!--I swear I will create video tutorials on each of the topics to put on the library website.  (I even added that to my goals for this year, so maybe I'll actually do it this year!)

If you have other ideas I could include, I would love to hear them.  Please add them to the comments, or any other comments you have on this plan in general.

As part of this I need to create and/or revamp various handouts.  I will, of course, post those as I go.

Top (Free!) Tools to Organize Online Research

I'm starting to think about what tools I'm going to introduce to the IB Extended Essay students to help organize themselves as they do their research. It seemed like a good time to do a re-cap (or a gathering!) of the different online note-taking/bookmarking tools I've mentioned before, and to look for any new ones.  All of these apps work via browser add-ons, and all allow sharing.

I will add that I tested several different tools; I only included a) those that allow you to grab and save content (images, text, etc.) b) the ones that actually worked.  A couple that shall remain nameless repeatedly crashed my browser, wouldn't save content, etc.  They didn't make the list, even in a negative review.  I also didn't include Google Notebook because they've stopped working on it. With that said, here are my top choices:

Diigo: Originally my app of choice, Diigo's biggest flaw is that you can't make folders to organize/categorize your saved information, which means you have to rely heavily on tagging to sift through the items. I'm not sure kids are all that methodical (or consistent) in their tagging, so that's a drawback.  Still, it's a nifty app, and they recently added the ability to capture screenshots and add call-outs to the image. Very cool. Diigo is most famous for the ability to both highlight text on a website, or add public or private sticky notes to the site.  (Kids really love that!)  They offer an education account that makes student sharing and collaboration a breeze. Diigo now has a web highlighter for Safari on the iPad as well as an offline reader for the iPhone.

iCyte:  The best thing about iCyte is it's so incredibly easy to use.  While the features are somewhat limited, it's perfect for upper elementary and middle school students. Clicking on the right side of the iCyte browser button captures a screenshot of the page you're on and brings up a window that allows you to assign the capture to a project, tag the shot and add notes. Clicking on the left side brings up a list of all your captures.   How easy is that?


Evernote:  The granddaddy of them all, of course, and probably the tool I will use with my IB students. Evernote is multi-faceted in that has a Firefox add-on, a desktop application, an iPhone/iPad app  AND an online version.  All of which sync, of course.  You can also add notes from Facebook, Twitter or via email. Evernote also recently added Trunk, a collection of a wide variety of apps and hardware that also work with Evernote. You can add images, text, audio, and video. Evernote saves it all. You can create folders to organize it all. It allows users to create to do lists, which is nice to help students organize their research tasks. Because it does so much, there is something of a learning curve, but it's not huge.  You can find my more detailed review here.

SpringPad:  While not as elegant as Evernote, SpringPad has one feature I really like: it has a notebook app that allows students to add content, and then arrange it onto different tabs. So, as you can see in the image, I created a general notebook for research on St. Francis, with tabs for him, the 5th crusade, and the sultan.  It has an alarm feature that can send either email or SMS reminders (about due dates, for example), as well as a to-do list to help students organize themselves.  Like the others, it can grab text as well as capture a screenshot of your webpage. It also offers apps for the iPhone or Android.

Zotero:  I have a real love/hate thing going on with Zotero.  I love it in theory.  Designed for college and graduate level research, it is phenomenal at capturing bibliographic info from online books, journal articles, websites--even pdf's--with a simple click, and allows users to choose from the major citation styles.  It's a cross between EasyBib and EverNote, in essence.  Sort of a free Noodle Tools.   It will store full files, you can add notes, grab screenshots and all the usual collaborative functions.  You can even use it as a notetaking tool with physical texts (though there's no reason you couldn't do that with Evernote, too.) Students manually add the bibliographic info, then notes are grouped under that entry. But for some reason I just don't like working with it much, and I don't think it would be all that intuitive for high-school students, though I'll admit I've never tried it with them.  If any of you have experience with it, I would be interested to hear what you think.

The Semi-Disconnected Life: An Experiment

I just got back from a week in Maine, vacationing with family on an island there.  We had a great time, but it was remote enough that we had no cell phone service, let alone access to wi-fi. The local library had wi-fi available when it was open, but I never managed to make it there.   So there I was, a nominal tech-guru, the type who checks her email at least twenty times a day, unwired and disconnected for a week.

I must say, it was a bit liberating.  I read three whole books. Long ones. More importantly, one rainy day, I actually sat and read for five hours straight.  The same book.  I'd all but forgotten what it was like to have that sort of concentrated experience with a piece of fiction, though I used to do it all the time.  The majority of my reading these days is non-fiction, and largely online.  If I read a book a month I'm doing well.

So get to the point, you say?  

Before I left, I'd been thinking quite a bit about Nicholas Carr, and his studies into the internet's effect on our brain.  (Links below, for reasons I'll explain later).

More specifically, I'm interested in the effects of hyperlinks on reading habits, the fragmentation of our attention span.  In my early blogging (and English-teaching) days, I bought the argument that they allowed for a deeper, more nuanced,  kind of writing, allowing writers to mention ideas and link to them without having to diverge from the main point. Theoretically, this created a more embedded reading experience, too, with an entire world of thought within one posting.

 Studies suggest the reality hasn't worked out as we thought, that the mere decision on whether or not to click a link interrupts and fragments the reading/thought process, let alone actually clicking on the link. (You'll find a sampling of my readings below.)  As Carr notes,

 The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it.

I was just reading a Joyce Valenza article this morning, and only made it through one paragraph before I had clicked on a link and was away on something else entirely.  I don't think I ever made it back to the original article, though there was more I wanted to read.

More importantly, how do links affect students' research behavior? Anecdotally, just in watching my coterie of researchers the past three years as they work their way through databases--they seldom take the time to read through an entire article; they tend to bookmark, then click away, collecting as many documents as possible, without taking much time to decide whether it's relevant and pertinent.

Now, resource gathering is a valid part of the research process, but I wonder if students would take more time in their initial assessment of database/web articles, if the links to other resources came AT THE END?

In my own little version of Carr's delinkification experiment, for the next two weeks, I'm going to post all hyperlinks at the end of each post.  I hope you'll take the time to note your reactions in the comments section.  Does it affect your reading of the post?  How might if affect students if we ask database companies to start hyperlinking at the end of their articles/entries?

And, here, dear reader, are my links:

Nicholas Carr:  His blog; his book, The Shallows.

My various online readings:

  Carr's dehyperlinking post

WSJ:  Carr on the internet; responses from Shirky and Pinker.

NY Times review of The Shallows.

First Diigo, then iCyte...now, Evernote

Do you ever feel like we're constantly re-inventing the wheel?  Web 2.0 can be something like that,  as we run across  new or, at least new-to-us apps similar to other apps we're already using.

Having jumped on the iCyte wagon, I groaned inwardly on discovering Evernote.  Another web-based notetaking app! But I must say, I like it. It straddles a fine line: more feature-rich than iCyte (and thus a bit less user-friendly) yet not as confusing as Diigo.

Moreover, it doesn't just store your data in the cloud.  You can download a desktop app, a smart phone app, and they all sync with your online data, making your notebooks available wherever you are.

While that's very useful, I think the notebooks make Evernote the go-to app over, say, iCyte and Diigo.  All three allow you to capture websites, make screen grabs, etc.  Only Evernote allows you to sort them into folders or notebooks.  While diehard social taggers consider folders so 20th century, most of us like the extray layer of organizaiton it allows.

Here's a screen-grab of the desktop application.  In the upper right you can see I have three folders created, though currently it's showing all the material in all the folders.  That includes photos taken with iSight, to do lists I created on the iPhone, as well as websites I visited and documented.

In the online version, you can see similar features.  Here, I've selected the "renaissance" folder, and the screen shots of those websites appear.

  If I click on one, it becomes editable, with a nifty feature showing the URL and the date I grabbed the shot (great for citation).

Create a new text note (in rich-text format, I might add), and it can either be straight-forward text, in a clickable to do list format or a table.  Though I must say, that function needs some work.  To make a to do list, you have to go up to the icon and click it for every new line.  VERY annoying and time-consuming.  You ought to be able to click it once, and have the rest of the note in the selected format.

In edit mode, users can also attach files to documents.  For example, if students took a screen shot of a painting, and they downloaded an article about that painting from a database, they could attach the pdf file to the shot of the image.

Like iCyte, Evernote worked with the databases--in fact, it could either just select specific portions, or grab the entire article, which was nice.  If I opted to just grab sections of an article, I could separate them with a line tool, making it easy to distinguish among the sections, instead of having one long block of paragraphs.

Students doing multimedia projects would find this especially useful for keeping their material organized, and I'm thinking of my documentary makers here.   They can collect all of their online research, use their smart phones to add B-roll images of documents or stills, as well as record audio interviews.  Once all of this is synced onto their laptop Evernote app, it's draggable to be used in video editing software.

Of course, this is imminently usable for personal organization as well.  Though I find all of management apps fall apart in one area for me:  they assume I'm organized enough to put all that info in the app in the first place...which I'm usually not.

iCyte: Better than Diigo?

I just discovered iCyte today. Similar to Diigo, iCyte allows users to bookmark sites, highlight useful text, and write comments. I introduced my students to Diigo this year as a way or organizing and keeping track of their online researching.

I must say, iCyte offers a smoother, more intuitive interface. Like Diigo, it's a browser add-on, but instead of a clunky line of tools across the width of your browser, it's a nifty little button next to the URL window. You can either open a side window showing your bookmark history, or click to create a new bookmark.





Creating a new bookmark pops up a window that allows you to tag the site and add a note. You can also highlight sections of the text that will appear when you go directly to the library. Very cool, and much easier than Diigo. Better yet, unlike Diigo the tools worked seamlessly when I tried them with databases. With Diigo, we had to figure out a rather convoluted work-around.



You can create several different projects, and your bookmarks can be either public or private...and shared, of course!

On the website, log in to "My View," choose your project, and you'll see the tags, the highlighted sections and your notes. Like Diigo, you can't organize sites into folders, but this is a great opportunity to teach students the value of tagging frequently and prolifically. If David Weinberger is right, hierarchical folders and files are 20th century thinking, and tagging is where it's at for findability!

Best of all, you don't have to look at all those annoying sticky notes on websites when Diigo is turned on!

Know Your Options!

Just when you thought you knew all there was to know about Google Search...they introduce the options button. I bet you didn't even notice. I sure didn't!

Here's a quick tutorial video, and below I'll discuss some of the implications/uses for this in library and research.



There are three options here I especially love.

1) Related Searches/Wonder Wheel. Most of us know it's an uphill battle getting students to plan their searches, generate key words, etc. When they can't find information within the first few hits, they give up. Other search engines provide related terms lists. Below you'll see a comparison of the results in a)Yahoo and b) Google. (Full disclosure: I was a beta-tester for the Yahoo related search options)






The search terms they suggest are fairly similar (though Google adds in some odd ones), and I do think students would find the "related concepts" in Yahoo helpful. Google sold me, however, with one link Yahoo doesn't offer: French Revolution Documents.

As students make increasing use of primary source material--our History Dept. requires students to use at least 7 in their research papers--they will welcome any help in what can often be a grueling search task.

Google takes the related search idea one step further by offering the Wonder Wheel, a graphical presentation of search options (ala Visu-Words) that not only leads students into ever more specific search, but also nods to learning styles preferences.

The Timeline can be used in two different ways. With the "French Revolution" search, for example, the user can drill down into specific dates. Clicking on the 1800's section produced a page on the Battle of Marengo on June 14th, 1800.

It can also reveal trends. Run a search on "autism," and you'll see an explosion from 2000 on, along with an odd spike in the 1940's. Upon further exploration, it turns out autism was identified in 1943, hence the high number of pages in that time frame.

Finally, the "Reviews" section in All Results. Students frequently--at least at our school!-have to find reviews of current topical books. If the NYT Book Review doesn't have it, they're often at a loss for where to look. A search for Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded turned up the NYT Book Review, Slate and wired.com, among others.

What I especially like about all of these options is their ease of use. For some reason, I can't seem to get the students to use the Avanced Search Options, though I keep plugging away. I suspect it requires too much thought/planning for them. ("Do I need all of these words, or just one of them?")

Options makes it a little easier for them to broaden their search options. However much I might decry their lack of initiative in generating their own search terms, if these tools keep them searching and digging longer, with useful results, who am I to argue?

Research, the Internet, Barabasi and...Robert Frost

According to a recent Boston Globe article research at the University of Chicago claims the internet is having a narrowing effect on...well...research.

In brief, databases, search engines, etc. all algorithmically favor recent articles over older, established (or obscure) texts, leading to a smaller range of sources and a "tightening of consensus."

There are those, of course, who disagree, and I look forward to watching the debate. Though,if nothing else, Laszlo-Barabasi describes the phenomenon in his excellent book, Linked.
While, theoretically, the internet makes everything available, in actuality it creates 'hubs' that attract the majority of links, based on popularity, leaving other sites stranded in oblivion, buried in the 11+ billion pages that make up the web.

If he doesn't mind me paraphrasing him, Doug Johnson wrote that he's not sure what the findings mean--it could be the idea of "sufficiency" has worked its way up the academic ladder.

I also wonder if that "breadth" that supposedly existed earlier wasn't a function of lack of access to a broad selection of current resources forcing scholars resort to the tried and true of what was already available. Along the same line, before the days of search engines, one really had to dig to find information. I remember spending HOURS poring through the Reader's Guide just to find a few articles that our library MIGHT have. Looking at everything else along the way might have led to some serendipitous finds. Online searching with its wealth of results make that serendipity less likely.

One of the comments mentioned a new search engine Sere.ndipito.us that tries to build in the "Eureka!" factor. I wasn't that impressed. It seems to limit results to only 10 or so. On my first search "French revlution" the results were exactly the same as Google's. (they display results side-by-side)

The next search for Basset Hound yielded different results and did, I must say, lead me to some

cool cartoons

Google didn't bring up. Other results were rather bizarre, though.

In the meantime, the kids will continue to do what I suspect kids have always done--find a few resources and think they're finished, while I nag and badger them to dig deeper.

All-In-One Research Organizer

Have you discovered Zotero, yet? It's billed as a "personal research assistant," created by the folks at George Mason University and funded by both the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. And it's free.

A Foxfire add-on, Zotero helps researchers gather and organize resources, take notes, cite sources in more styles than I've even heard of, create bibliographies and share results. Students can save websites, highlight add sticky notes, created note cards--it's great! It even works with many databases, such as JSTOR.

I was thinking of subscribing to NoodleTools for the school next year and using it with Diigo, until one of our tech guys sent me the Zotero link. Now, I plan to make Zotero's installation and basic training part of Day One for all research projects.

The Zotero site also includes several good tutorials on both a basic and advanced level.

Definitely worth checking out!

Well, Duh....

A new report from the CIBER research team at University College London just reaffirmed what every teaching librarian already knows: most students are functionally information illiterate. The so-called "Google generation," while far more at ease and familiar with computers and the online environment than adults--at least when it comes to social networking--know squat about finding, recognizing and managing information.

Well, they phrased it more eloquently.

You can access the entire report here, but I'll summarize what I thought were the most interesting points.

User Behavior
According to the report, 89% of college students use search engines to start an information search. (I'd say that's even higher in secondary school.) Only 2% actually start from a library website. 93% are satisfied/very satisfied with their search, compared to only 84% who use a library assisted search (this surprised me).

What was especially interesting was the change in reading habits to what the study called "horizontal information seeking." And this was in adults (teachers, professors) as well as students. Users engage in "power browsing," bouncing and flitting from subheading to subheading, clicking on links, viewing no more than a page or two on any individual site. 60% of ejournal users view not more than 3 pages, and 65% never return.

In fact, people spend most of their time just trying to navigate around.

Information Management
Not only has students' information literacy not improved with technology (though it hasn't worsened, either), technology masks troubling issues.

1. "The speed of young people's web searching means little time is spent evaluating information.
2. Students have a poor understanding of their information needs, and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies.
3. Their preference for natural language searching hinders an analysis of more effective key words
4. Faced with a long list of search hits, students find it difficult to asses for relevance, and often print off pages with no more than a glance
5. Many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive, and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo."

Most interestingly, while many of the teachers interviewed were information literate, their skills and attitudes were not passed on to their students.

And, of course, students don't get it.

The problem here is that they simply do not recognize that they have a problem: there is a big gap between their actual performance in information literacy tests and their self-estimates of information skill and library anxiety.

As my title suggests, we all knew this. Yet as we continue to advocate for our increasing relevance in today's informationally overloaded environment, it's good to have the actual statistics to back ourselves up.

What I do find worrying about this study, and about my own students' information behavior, is the implication that we're doing a poor job of meeting their needs. As the study states,

Information consumers--of all ages--use digital media voraciously, and not necessarily in the ways that librarians assume. Any barrier to access: be that additional log-ins, payment or hard copy, are too high for most consumers and information behind those barriers will increasingly be ignored....students usually prefer the global searching of Google to more sophisticated searching....provided by the library, where students must make separate searches of the online catalog and every database, after first identifying which might be relevant.

In other words, when I tell students to ignore the interface that allows them to search every database at once (regardless of its relevance to their topic), and to search the databases individually (returning more useful results), I'm actually working against my intentions of making their lives easier.

I need to think about this one, and will certainly be posting more on it later.

Subject-Specific Search Tutorials

I talked to one of the teachers this morning who teaches anthropology, and he wants me to work with his students on how to search. I'm thrilled, but also clueless about anthropology. So I was hunting around on the web and found this great site from the UK, a series of tutorials on how to search, created for each subject area.

Specialists from UK colleges and universities write the tutorials, and each tutorial consists of four parts:

• "Tour" leads to reviewed websites in the subject area
• "Discover" teaches how to search effectively
• "Judge" gives advice on determining the value and authority of a site, and
• "Success" sets up subject-based practice searches

Very cool, and lead me to anthro.net, billed as a "research" engine for anthropologists, which will be very useful for the students. (And which, apparently, is having troubles loading today as I blog this, though it loaded fine yesterday. Don't you love the internet?)

I'm Back! I'm Back! I'm Back!

Wow, what an unintentional blogging vacation that ended up being!

Between a new job and a new state (we're still unpacking!), trying to get the internet hooked up, a fence for the dog, not to mention the shock to the system of working full time again after a year "off" as a student....well. Who had time to think about blogging, beyond occasional guilt bouts!

However, life has now settled (a bit), and I'm definitely having food-for-blogging in discovering the contrast between theoretical librarianship and in-the-high-school-trenches librarianship.
But more on that later...

In the meantime, here's a cool new resource. Ohio State University has a Cartoon Research Database with more than 250,000 original cartoons, both historical and modern.