Information = Technology?

When the word information is mentioned, we often associate it with data, which evokes the feeling that it's almost not possible to obtain information anymore without the use of technology. These days, when our  students - who are truly digital natives - encounter a question, they immediately want to "google" it. Some of them have the habit of typing entire questions into the browser, others don't even bother typing, just ask Siri. 

https://medium.com/@miacrnfrska/digital-native-and-digital-immigrant-how-can-these-groups-work-together-592fff906fb1

As a teacher-librarian I almost feel that one of my most important missions is to convince them that books are just as useful as digital devices, and they might even be more efficient, because you probably don't have to spend time verifying the information or fact checking the website. 

I almost feel that I have to prove to them that information existed before the digital age! We, who are now defined as "digital immigrants", were just as information literate twenty-thirty years ago as our students are becoming - thanks to our media skills projects - in 2022. Information literacy is a student's "ability to locate, evaluate and use information in a variety of formats to meet their information needs. " (Riedling, Ann, Reference skills for the school librarian: Tools and tips, Fourth Edition. p.6) Maybe we didn't have a variety of formats (Internet, databases, online tools, apps), but we found what we were looking for, in books.

The greatest difference would be that students before the digital age would not have been able to conduct a search without understanding the difference between printed reference sources, such as encyclopaedias, almanacs, fact books, bibliographies and such; they had to know how they are organized, what their primary function is. When students search online, they might think these skills are unnecessary, but "it's important to think strategically about which electronic information resource to use for a particular information need, because each one provides different kinds of information and involves different types of search strategies." (Riedling, 2019. p. 101)

In my SLLC I don't think I have seen students voluntarily picking up reference books in the last five years. Oh yes, actually they did, just last week. A group of grade 7's needed some heavy weights to balance a camera when filming a green screen scene. 

from Pinterest

The dogs may bark, but the caravan...

My takeaway from Lesson 2 was mostly thinking and rethinking the ways how we do inquiry projects in our school; what steps we follow, how students synthesize the information they collect. 

Regarding reference materials, I see a major switch around grade 4, probably because that's the age when children gain access to devices at home and get more familiar with them. While elementary students happily pick up nonfiction books while researching a topic, intermediates would rather choose the internet. If they have the choice, by grade 7 all their reference material would be digital. When a grade 6 class was working on Canadian provinces and territories for a virtual cross-Canada trip, the pile of brand new, beautifully illustrated "a Trip Through Canada" series was lying on the counter for weeks, untouched. The books would have been perfect for the project and would have saved them an enormous amount of time and effort. Still, they were only attracted to online resources, and the the selection and evaluation of these took probably twice as much time - not even counting the wasted minutes (or hours) that they spent on websites that had nothing to do with the topic, but distracted them while surfing on the world wide web. 

Image Credit: Angela Waye / Shutterstock

Crops and Weeds

"The fertile field cannot produce good crops as long as the weeds are not cleared away." The Taoist quote might be about clearing our minds from temptations, but it might as well describe a good selection of reference books in a SLLC. Reading the criteria for weeding our library materials in Riedling's book (p. 17-19) made me more determined that we will need a serious evaluation of the nonfiction materials at the end of the year, when we do our inventory. Here is an acronym to help the process: 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_book_bindings.jpg

Misleading and/or factually inaccurate 

Ugly and worn beyond mending or rebinding 

Superseded by a newer edition or by a much better book 

Trivial with no discernible value 

Your collection has no use for this material, irrelevant to the needs of your clientele

(Allen, M (2010) Weed 'Em and Reap: The Art of Weeding to Avoid Criticism. Library Media Connection, 28 (6), p. 32-33.)

It's time to get rid of musty books!

Opportunities to Learn - for Students and Teachers

Lesson 4 made me think of my own bias about electronic resources. I am not sure if I should call them bias, or "pet peeves", or "times when I get suspicious"...

• During research student chooses to watch a YouTube video: "But it's about my topic!"
• Student types one single word into the search engine and clicks on the first link that shows up
• Student is enthusiastically reading a website that has nothing to do with the topic -all because of a misspelled word in the browser
• Student spends twice as much time on choosing a Power Point template with a certain colour scheme and fancy animations than on the actual presentation
• Student googles pictures about the topic and chooses the cutest one, but with a huge watermark across it
• Student copies and pastes a sentence from a website, but failed to highlight the whole sentence and it makes no sense
• Student looks up a picture, and chooses the one that doesn't have anything to do with the topic
• Student doesn't understand a word, looks it up and chooses a definition that has four additional words in it that he doesn't understand

What did I miss? What did I do wrong? ...I ask myself in these situations, and we go back and explain it over and over again. Because "opportunities are like sunrises. If you miss them, they are gone." (Riedling, 2019. p.105.)