eSourcing - The Why

Think- when was the last time you needed information, and why did you need it?

Your mind may have went straight to the academic world, and you might have thought about research you were conducting, a paper you were writing, or a report you had to give.  Maybe you thought about a presentation or persuasive argument you had to develop in the workplace. Or maybe you just thought about the last time you needed directions, a review for a restaurant, or product descriptions for a purchase.

Now that you've identified that need, reflect on what that experience was like for you. Where did you get your information, and how did you know the information was accurate?

I'm going to guess that you started here.

If I'm right, why didn't you go to your local city, school, or university library? Why didn't you check the bookshelves you have in your home, stored on an eReader, or in your classroom or office? I'm going to guess your next answer. Because searching online was more accessible. 

This is how the majority of our world obtains information. We use YouTube, blogs, news feeds, and Google searches to find information. We use information literacy skills to determine the validity of these works. When these skills are telling us we need to find information that has been vetted, we seek out different resource obtainment skills and look for information from contributing gurus that our Google searches have turned up. This might mean that we pay for a subscription to a scholarly journal or download a book on our Kindle. Maybe it means we seek a nearby conference we could attend so that we can hear the information first hand. Whatever this might look like, it's differentiated. It's specific to each person, and relevant to their search. 

This is the process that takes place any time a student is asked to write a report. It's the process that takes place anytime information needs to be shared in the workplace. It's also the process that we use when we're interested in something that may have absolutely nothing to do with work or school, but just something we want to apply to our own lives, like breaking a bad habit and picking up a healthy one. It's easy to do because we have so much information readily available to us on the Internet. 

However, in most academic cases, students do not get the opportunity to consider multiple viewpoints, apply skills of information literacy, and use some of the sources that I've described above. Resources students are allowed to use are often limited to what instructors provide to them, and sometimes, that information is delivered in the form of a textbook that may be outdated. Sometimes, the information may be provided in the form of a lecture. Regardless, the information is from one source and it provides one viewpoint. 

This is why, in my classroom, I provided eSources to my students. We used websites, textbooks, scholarly articles written at varying reading levels, live interviews from experts in the field, videos, pictures, and books to help us make meaning. We did this because it was real world, and it allowed students to construct knowledge and create content instead of consume and regurgitate information. This was differentiated, to provide each student with materials that was on his or her level, interesting and engaging to each individual student, so that again, it mimicked the real world. 

Many people refer to this as open educational resources, and there is no shortage of them in our world. Some are free and some are cheap. Some are not. But there is one thing that they all have in common, and that's their rate of refresh. They are all up to date. 

Our students are different today, just like we were different when we were in school. It's because our world is different. There is more access to information, more reference to information, and at the same time, a larger community of those willing to share than there ever has been before. This is why, when we decide to eSource, we find that it is not difficult. Instead, we find that it provides a richer, relevant, and realistic construction of knowledge. 

So if you're an educator, I am going to challenge you to eSource your classroom. To make it real life, teaching students how to apply information literacy skills so they can effectively recognize a hoax, an altered viewpoint, and to question information. I am going to challenge you to allow students to help your classes determine vetted resources by providing feedback similar to how we do on eCommerce sites. This is a huge benefit to your students.

Are you up for the challenge? Here's how to eSource.

Wikipedia. Hate it or Love it?

So I have this thing I do when I need a very quick answer and it is fact based, like a date, location, or history. No, I don't ask Siri (unless I'm driving). Instead, I look it up on Wikipedia.

Right now, there's a lot of educators that are either gasping or shaking their heads in shame. And I used to be one of those educators that told my students they couldn't use it as a resource.

I said things like this:
"Do you know that anyone could just create an account and start typing stuff?"
"How do you know that someone who really knows what they're talking about wrote that?"
"It's not reliable. Choose from one of the resources I gave you."

No student ever questioned me, but looking back, I wish they would have. I wish my students would have brought up the fact that our textbook still said Pluto was a planet, but Wikipedia reflected the change. I wish they would have said that I had taught them to research by gathering multiple resources that all gave the same information, and they could use both their judgement and the strategies I had taught them when reading various Wikipedia articles.

A few years ago, I realized that a friend from high school had listed "Wikipedia Editor" as a job on her Facebook page.  This caught my interest, so I asked her about what she did and it's validity. Here's what she told me:

"Since anyone that registers for a wikipedia account can edit pages that aren't protected (locked), they use patrollers who go through every change that is made. The patrollers try to catch vandalism like somebody putting something entirely absurd or their personal opinion on articles. The patrollers can easily reverse the change and go back to the older, archived version of the article before changes were made. If there is uncertainty about whether the edit is "good" or not, the page is earmarked for an editor in that field to look at.

When I log into wikipedia, I can go to that list at my leisure and look through the edits. The ongoing, ever-being-updated list is catered so that those subjects that I've previously said I know more about are higher on my list that things I've indicated I don't know as much about (you rank your knowledge on different subjects 1-10). Occasionally there will be a questionable article marked by a patroller that any editors that have been online have passed by and then the listed editors in that field will get these automatically generated email messages asking you to log in and look it over, starting with those that have a rank of 10 in that category, until someone marks it as okay or switches it back to the archived version. Most of the time the page is marked as "needing cleaned up" or "needing references." Most people that do very much editing keep the articles they contributed to on their "watch list" so that they know if anyone edits their info. 
There's sort of a delicate balance between allowing everyone to edit and doing all of this patrolling, and locking problem pages so that only certain people can make changes to it. You don't want a sixth grader writing about his version of what cancer is, or a crusader editing the stem cell page, so certain pages are protected to varying degrees. Those pages have a picture of a padlock in the upper right corner. These pages have gone through WikiProject collaborations to come up with what editors in that field have deemed comprehensive and accurate. Most of these have a place where people can leave comments about possible edits that might need to be made."

This explanation, along with the fact that Wikipedia articles are some of the most up-to-date, always there resources, made me change my mind about whether Wikipedia was a "bad" or "good" resource. Besides, I required my students to back up their research by finding the information in multiple places, anyway. Why was I forbidding one of those multiple resources?

I think the bottom line should be that students should be considering ALL sources, not just the ones provided to them (or in this case, forbidden of them). In today's world, it is so easy to create content, and I can think of many websites right off the top of my head that have erroneous information. I think it's actually a better service to teach our students the 21st century information literacy that will provide them with protocols of how to choose appropriate resources. Besides, Wikipedia is typically where Siri tells me I should look when I ask her, too.