JakesOnline!-Locating Information

STEP 4: Locating Information

KEY: The shape of information has changed. Expect blogs and wiki content to contribute to student research. Other tools and resources have emerged that provide a flow of information to the user, rather than the user actively searching for information in response to a question.

Students are now ready to locate information. This can be an overwhelming task for students as the Web now contains over one billion pages and some estimates are as high as 550 billion pages. Most students by the time they have reached high school are familiar with search tools such as Google and Yahoo. Younger students are familiar with Ask Jeeves and Yahooligans. Many tools with great capability can be introduced here; our suggestion is based on our classroom experience that when given a pool of tools, each student will find a certain comfort level with a subset from the pool. Some may use two tools, others may use five to eight.

Here my list of search tools that would be part of the “tool pool.”

Google
Clusty
Yahoo
Soople
Vivisimo
A9
Teoma
Mamma
Singingfish
Kartoo
Grokker
Technorati

For a complete description of these search tools, please see my Web Searching Collection at Jakesonline.org.

Interestingly, two of the search tools (Kartoo and Grokker) provide a visual, hyperlinked map of the search return. While this is hopelessly impossible for a 46 year old to negotiate, 14 year old students raised on Inspiration negotiate it easily and effectively.

Technorati is a tool that searches blogs. It would be up to an individual teacher whether he or she wanted to introduce this tool. Anyone familiar with blogs (a personable publishing site) knows that they may contain personalized, biased information. On the other hand, the can be repositories filled with rich and varied types of information. If blogs are to be used in inquiry-based research, it is imperative the teacher spend time with information evaluation. It should also be noted that it is just a matter of time before we cross this bridge, blogs are not going away and every day they gain more legitimacy as a serious information resource.

What constitutes information?

Since the first release of this paper, the Web has greatly changed. The advent of social software tools (such as blogs, wikis, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Furl) has given even the technology neophyte the capability to produce content quickly and easily. The emergence of Wikipedia has given Internet users access to the first global encyclopedia authored by everyone and anyone. The power of Wiki technology will certainly not stop there (Wikis are shared collaborative Web pages permitting multiple authorship) and this tool has tremendous potential to promote the development of collaborative content. Obviously, this points to the need for information evaluation, but it also suggests that these new tools can be used as platforms for students to contribute their ideas online (as the result of the inquiry process, of course), making students not only users, but contributors to the current rip, mix, and burn culture that has emerged online.

The upshot of this is that information is no longer the domain of traditional content providers. Anyone can be a content provider, and can provide information in multiple formats, beyond the typical text-based Web page. Flickr users provide visual information in the form of 100 million photographs, deli.ico.us and Furl users provide lists of Web links, so that when combined with traditional text sources, information seekers have access to text-based information, visual information, and potential sources of information provided by others in the form of Web links.

Information Flow

In 2001, students using the inquiry method described in this paper in actively sought information by using search tools and syntax to locate the necessary information when they needed information to answer a question. The process was in a definite direction, with the student initiating the search in response to the need. This is still true today and effective today. But in 2005, there is another option, with information reaching the student through a much different direction- through a continual information flow to the student. This flow can be thought of as a subscription-a feed of applicable information of many different types from multiple sources flowing into a single location. Many reading this will recognize this as RSS syndication technology-the ability of a user to obtain information feeds from information resources (blogs, wikis, Flickr, deli.ico.us) all delivered to one location, or an aggregrator (Bloglines.com, for example).

RESOURCES: Locating Information

STEP 1: Asking the Essential Question

STEP 2: Writing Foundation Questions

STEP 3: Developing a Search Strategy

STEP 4: Locating Information

STEP 5: Filter, Distill and Cross-Referencing

STEP 6: Evaluate the amount of information

STEP 7: Develop the answer to the Essential Question

STEP 8: Develop a product to represent the answer

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