January 19th, 2021
Technical Skills vs. Information Sources
Instead of recommending online sources, I usually find myself in the role of advising people on how to use the sources they have already chosen. Better librarians than me have spent time trying to get people to stop using Google or Wikipedia. Instead, I try to provide an expert perspective on how to use these tools effectively. As a public children's librarian, the online research question I get asked most often is, how can I print out pictures of [fill-in-the-subject]? Children want my technical expertise, not my opinion on the credibility of a source. I do think it is possible to provide both, but I have to start by answering the question they are asking.
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Comments (4)
Comments (4)
When students approach me using Wikipedia for a research project, that's my cue to introduce them to the world of online encyclopedias. "Oh, you're looking for a source of information that provides a quick overview of a topic? Wikipedia is one example of an online encyclopedia. If you'd like, I can show you an online encyclopedia written at your grade level and that is written by experts." Then, I'll show kids Encyclopedia Brittanica online or Pebble Go (for very young kids).
Nice segue! Your comment also makes me think about the challenges of freely available resources vs. ones that require subscriptions. How can we make the subscription sites as easy to use as wikipedia? Is that something we should be explicitly teaching kids? Reliable information maybe more costly (in time and trouble, not just money) than the free stuff?
Hi Emily:
Thanks for joining our conversation. That's an important point -- that you have to answer the question they ask first. I see that you used to be a school librarian. Did you play an educator's role then? If so, how did you help students get to reliable sources?
I did play an educator's role. The dream when you are a school librarian is that teachers will collaborate with you around research projects, but I was in elementary schools, where there is not much time in the schedule (usually) for the kind of constructivist, open-ended research we would like to do. I more often created my own curriculum and activities where I asked the whole class to get information from one source or to compare two sources. I hoped that the comparison exercises were good models of what they should do when they conducted their own research--look for more than one source and examine the similarities and differences. I'm not big on recommending individual sources, because that doesn't help them when they're doing their own Googling on a topic that I haven't suggested. I'm big on modeling critical thinking and evaluating sources.