Why awards?

This week’s blog post will be very brief as a function of my extreme exhaustion – just been up and down to Bangalore for the Neev Literature Festival 2019. Beijing-Bangalore is not a commute I’d recommend to anyone who prizes their sleep or sanity but WOW what an intense 2 days it was.

The theme this year was “Taking Children’s Literature Seriously” and I’ll write a bit more about the rest of the festival another time.

For now I just want to highlight the winners:

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After a year of reading the long lists and short lists in four categories the awards were announced on Saturday for this year’s winners. I must say it was a surprisingly emotional moment even for me just as one of the jurors, I can’t imagine what it must be like for the authors!

There’s been a bit written recently about literary prizes – “Who Cares about Literary Prizes” is a wonderful article combining the idea of “canon” and popularity in this context with some very cool data representation. Book Prizes, the more the merrier, and A guide to the most prestigious prizes.

Book buyers, librarians, teachers, parents tend to rely on a fairly narrow range of sources for their book purchasing decisions. One of those is lists, and the other prize winners (and often lists of prize winners). In this context the existence of speciality or niche book prizes is incredibly important to shed light on otherwise neglected corners of excellent children’s literature.

Since Ahimsa is already relatively well known in international children’s literature circles, I’m going to just put in a few words about the other three books.

Machher Jhol is a richly illustrated book showing the journey of a young boy through the roads of Kolkata to get the ingredients for a fish stew for his father. There is a wonderful twist to this tale that will make it beloved of any class looking for books on resilience.

When Jiya met Urmila is written for that space of emerging readers where very few authors manage to successfully tell a great story but make the writing accessible to the beginning reader. The story gently probes how segregated childrens’ lives can be.

Year of the Weeds is one of those books that I can see becoming part of a canon of middle grade / young adult books that are used in the classroom to promote thinking about globalisation, sustainable development goals of economic growth (8); industry and infrastructure (9); sustainable cities and communities (11) responsible consumption and production (12); and Life on land (15) – while still being an excellent read.   The link above goes to a very interesting interview with the author.

neev awards.jpg

Another thing that awards do – reward publishers for taking chances on genres, topics and authors.  This year Duckbill publishers had two award winning books – here’s hoping they continue to bet on this calibre of writing AND even more importantly that their books get attention and distribution outside of India, because the world needs these books.

In response to requests – here is where to find the books:

Ahimsa

When Jiya Met Urmila

I will be sharing an email to contact if you are interested in buying the short-list or finalists in multiple copies.

In addition if you’re interested in other books:

Here is the short list:

Here is the complete LongList nominated by Indian publishers

 

Seek and Find – breakout

In the interests of trying new things myself, and also making library orientation and searching the catalog / tracing items from the catalog to the physical copy more fun, I decided to create a library breakout.

I’d watched the “Breakout” phenomenon ebb and flow about 3-4 years ago and had always put it in the “fun, but how?” box, and this year finally decided to get into action. Our HS Edtech person had purchased the official “Breakout box” so I could have a look at that and the resources in the official site, and our ES Edtech person had deconstructed the idea and had a bunch of Stanley boxes, suitcases with locks and locks, so I had a lot to play around with. The first port of call was the official Breakout Site. Like all great ideas, this seems to be one that had its hey-day around 2015 and many of the potentially interesting links to library orientation were either broken, or the video instruction didn’t work or there were other issues, so, I left, muttering “maintenance” . I found a few good breakout description online (Library Media TechTalk; The Bright Ideas Library; LibraryStew; Ms. Kochel’s book blog;) and then, after getting an idea of how it could work, sat down and thought of what my aims would be.

  1. I wanted to highlight the “Panda” books – the annual students’ choice books that are on a huge display in the library but often get overlooked by students and teachers alike – we order 5/6 copies of each book each year and students vote on their favourite in March.
  2. I wanted students to be familiar with the library guides and bookmark the front page.
  3. I wanted to make sure students could log onto the library catalog, search for a book and then find the physical copy in the library
  4. I wanted each student to know how to use the “self-checkout” station
  5. I wanted the students to search the catalog to find more obscure items (in titles, in descriptions of books, number of books in a series etc)

With my “ISTE educator” hat on, I wanted to ensure I could work on the role of “Facilitator”:

Educators facilitate learning with technology to support student achievement of the 2016 ISTE Standards for Students. Educators:
a. Foster a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes in both independent and group settings.
b. Manage the use of technology and student learning strategies in digital platforms, virtual environments, hands-on makerspaces or in the field.
c. Create learning opportunities that challenge students to use a design process and computational thinking to innovate and solve problems.

In this case they would be “Knowledge constructors”

3. Knowledge Constructor
Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others. Students:
a. plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.

ATLS (approaches to learning):

  • Thinking – Creative thinking / problem solving
  • Self Management – Affective – show resilience; Demonstrate persistence and perseverance
  • Social – Collaborative – share responsibility and roles with others

Universal design for learning:

  • Multiple means of Engagement: Provide options for Sustaining Effort & Persistence
  • Multiple means of Action and Expression: Provide options for Physical Action

The guide for the breakout can be found here with the clues. Students could access this guide through a QR code on the box.  Most of them didn’t examine the box for the QR code but went straight for the printed instructions.

The activity needed at least 50-60 minutes – with some classes we had that, and generally those were the more successful classes who managed to complete all locks.

Some teams / classes didn’t complete for various reasons, and they didn’t get anything. Nothing. No compensatory prizes, no consolation prizes. The teams who did succeed could trade in their “key for success” cards in the box for boxes of “smarties” or chocolates – and the feeling of success.

Main takeaways:

  •  Students need to be carefully guided to read the instructions completely and carefully
  • Their enthusiasm and “let’s run here” inclinations needs to be tempered with “hey guys, how about stopping and thinking about …”
  • Where an activity led them to need to get a next clue from the library staff, our staff was instructed that they only proceeded if they were politely addressed and asked (part of the hidden agenda that my staff are people with feelings who need to be treated respectfully)
  • Students (and teachers) often don’t see displays and look over them – their attention needs to be brought to things deliberately
  • Don’t assume anything – some 14 year olds have never done puzzles or have any idea of what a cipher wheel is!

 

How to lie and cheat …

Teaching academic honesty is always a tricky one. Last year, my involvement was limited to showing a tool (Noodletools) to large groups of students, howling in protest that they preferred the predatory alternative EasyBib, too late in the year and being a second opinion on whether submitted work was honest or not.

This year, I’m more of a “known factor” and when I offered to start the year with a more general discussion on honesty rather than just getting into the nitty gritty of citation, a fellow teacher offered to lend a hand in a Day 9 session.

In order to get more than three nerds to sign up, I billeted it as “How to lie and cheat your way to academic success” and an unprecedented 30 students signed up for the session – the maximum allowed. During the planning we set out to find out a little more about the motivations of students and to ensure we engaged MYP ATLs, and I wanted to make sure we covered the ISTE student standards of Digital Citizen and the UDL (Universal Design for Learning) standard of “Multiple means of Engagement”. 

ATLs (Approaches to Learning)

Thinking skills

  • Critical Thinking
  • Creative Thinking

Research Skills

  • Information Literacy

ISTE Student:

2. Digital Citizen
Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical. Students:

b. engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices.
c. demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.

My co-teacher Jo had some valuable day-to-day insights from the classroom of where students had a lack of understanding or were mis-understanding the topic which helped guide our planning and thinking about the session.

We started with a quick survey using Mentimeter to get an understanding where any potential plagiarism could arise. The questions were adapted from the “Symptoms of Plagiarism” by Dianne MacKenzie, further discussed here. We explained that all answers were anonymous and it wasn’t any reflection on them but rather feedback to us as teachers. We zoomed in on discussing “must do well” to better understand whether the pressure was internal (self) or external (parental) or a mixture and found it was pretty evenly spread. As teachers and creators of assignments the 25% who said they “didn’t understand the assignment” gave further pause for thought on how we set and word assessments and assessment rubrics, and also credence to our new MYP coordinator’s emphasis on ensuring teachers and students are familiar with the MYP command terms (Libguide by Stephen Taylor).

 

After this, we showed them their homework diaries, where at the back we’d included a graphic of our Middle School Academic Honesty Policy, and an adapted summary of Turnitin’s spectrum of plagiarism. Yet another example of not assuming “if you put it there they will notice” since none of them had noticed what was at the back of their homework agenda! Following the Turnitin spectrum we discussed the various types with real life examples. They didn’t have any idea there were so many variations, and in particular were interested in the fact that reusing your own work was not ethical if you

Academic honesty

didn’t cite yourself. As was making up data for lab reports or “client requests” for design. 

Then they played a matching game of plagiarised text to type of plagiarism. And successfully matched all types.

In four groups they were given a moral compass and allocated 10-12 “Got Ethics” cards to discuss and place on the compass based on group consensus. And when they were finished they could rank the cards in the “wrong” sector by increasing level of “wrongness”  Interestingly here, one of the groups of girls were critical of the cards themselves saying the clothing of the girls images (exposed stomachs) was sexist and not gender neutral!

The final 15 minutes were spent on a Kahoot where we wrapped up all the elements of the session with a quiz where we explained that some of the questions had no right answer or a few options, and we’d pause every now and again to discuss things like what the difference was between copying a story and writing fan-fiction and fractured fairytales. 

We felt it was 70 minutes well spent with engaged and interested students throughout and will probably run the session again.

Little big things

Or perhaps big little things? The theme for this year’s Collaboration for Growth MYP session is “School Cultures; How do we shape them? How do they shape us?”

It made me think about what is different this year to last year culturally (besides feeling less like a deer in the headlights as it’s my 2nd year). A big thing has been the change in our school food provider. One would think that food is food and there’s not much difference between one and the other, but there has been quite a big shift. Last year many of us descended to one of the lounges and ate communally. It was fun to see on any particular day who would be there, and such interesting conversations would be had between Elementary, Middle and High school teachers and staff. You never knew who you’d bump into and all sorts of know-how and information would be passed along over lunch.

As someone not particularly inclined to shop and cook (and who’s trying to teach my teen to cook for himself, so increasingly leaving him up to fending for his dinners himself) it meant having a nutritious main meal for lunch and not bothering about dinner.

These days, the lounge is semi-deserted. I hardly ever see the people I used to bump into unless we make a point of meeting after school or for an external lunch – so much more effort. No more chatter about what’s going on educationally or personally in our lives. No more great ideas plotted out. Now I make a double meal at night and warm it up in our divisional microwave in our divisional staffroom if I can be bothered, or just eat at my desk when things are too overwhelming.

A little thing. A little big thing. But many have been mentioning the loss. And so culture changes. Without intent, positive or negative.

Collaboration is air to us

And we need it to survive.

I meant to write this post a little while back, but then school started, and whoosh there went all my potential blogging time.

On one of the FB groups I follow someone was asking about teaching academic integrity / honesty. Naturally the librarians in the group responded with “ask your librarian”. To which the poster responded “I took it on. Go me!”

There are so many things wrong with this response it’s hard to know where to begin. And yet it is pretty common. Even in IBO programs. Maybe especially in IBO programs? You see a lot of IB educators (PYP, MYP, IBDP) are really smart people. Often they’re subject specialists. They’ve had additional post-graduate training specific to the IB, and often also have post-graduate degrees.

So what can be so hard for a person like that to teach information literacy / academic honesty etc? Why on earth should they involve their teacher-librarian (assuming that one still survives in their organisation and hasn’t been replaced by a (unqualified) parent volunteer or the principal’s wife?

In the first instance it’s not quite as easy and clear cut as people presume it is. Heck there are people like Mike Caulfield make it their life’s work to seriously consider information literacy and over the years boil it down to its most useful essence – perhaps in response to the “go me!” attitude of educators.

I’ve walked into classrooms where teachers have been talking old-fashioned nonsense that was relevant in the time they studied and had to go back to micro-fiches or dig through unfederated databases. Classrooms where teachers are mixing up APA in-text citations with MLA7 works cited lists in an environment where MLA8 is the norm. Classrooms where teachers have unattributed images or texts in use…

But worse than all of that, they have a black and white view of plagiarism. One that is unsubtle and non-nuanced. One that makes students “good or evil” and neglects the approach that academic honesty is a community effort. That it’s too late to make it a quick add on to a lesson. I’ve written on this in the past – plagiarism is not a simple matter, but mired in assumptions, teaching, culture and ignorance. And that’s the exact reason why it should be addressed centrally with common language, common understanding and be phased in over years with teachers and the rest of the community as role models.

Academic honesty is not just about consistent, correct citations. It is an integral part of how we look at research and inquiry. It’s not just a once off lesson taught in isolation, it’s part of us helping students to develop as researchers (please read this post on citations helping research in backward design). But if the teacher librarian is left out of the equation, it is not part of a progression, not part of ongoing development. And then we get teachers grumbling about how students are lazy and just copying and pasting, and having no integrity blah blah blah.

So don’t “go you” – unless you’re going to your teacher librarian (TL). And if you haven’t bothered to talk to, or collaborated with your TL, do yourself, and your students a favour and do so. Yes you’re smart and all that. But the TL is a specialist in this stuff (remember the two masters degrees they need?). And if they’re not used, you’ll be left with a bunch of apps and ignorance. And the problem will not go away with some nifty templates from teachers-pay-teachers or your mates on FaceBook.

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Photo by Fedor GoldBerg from Pexels

The unbearable everythingness of being new

This is a post I couldn’t write last year. Because I was new. I’ve just about spent half of my life being new in a country, city, job, school. A third of my life of newness ago I would have unabashedly blogged about the newness, heck, even 10 years ago I would have. Now its become more difficult. Because new never gets easier no matter how often you’re new. And now watching this year’s intake of “newbies” and witnessing the change of our Wechat group name to “twobies” there is still that pang of identification.

There are two opposing forces. The buddhist “where-ever you go, there you are” (title of a meditation book by Kabat-Zinn, source unknown) and the “immovable object vs. unstoppable force”. And every shade inbetween. I just love that video below especially the line about “passing through each other with no effect on each other at all”

That’s pretty meta. In the past year I’ve been through a range of emotions as I attempt do match my version of reality with the culture and situation of where I am. I still have all sorts of plans and dreams and ideals. And at the end of the first week back I see those reflected in those who are now new, as they grapple with trying to understand 100 moving parts all at once and to excavate what is “mission critical” as it relates to surviving and thriving in a new culture while choosing the right priorities that are going to make the most difference to the young bodies and minds we serve and still remaining emotionally intact.

There is this medical myth that you rejuvenate every cell in your body over the course of seven years. I wonder what the equivalent period is for organisations? I wonder what the optimal changeover period is? And I wonder how much change is like me painting my nails? Truth. Every year I think I’ll try and be more groomed. And go off and have my nails painted. And within hours realise that my life is not compatible with manicured nails, as bits get damaged and other bits flake off. If I’m lucky as least one nail will last more than 3 days. I think people who have been in organisations for a long time watch the painted nails come and go. And I think that truly for the brief time they endure in a dominant culture they make a real beautiful difference for the students that are in their classes. But that immovable object.

How do new people in existing organisations replenish? There’s that edu-celebrity stuff going around on twitter with the posters and wall quotes and door signs saying we need to say to students “You are enough. We’re happy you are here” I think we need to be saying that every day to the new cells in our organisation. To be welcoming and absorbing and helping them to be who they are and bring what they’ve brought. Perhaps something easier to do when you’re recently new than if you’ve been around 5, 10, 20 years when you’re orbiting around different planets.

Have a great year everyone, and when you’re not, most librarians have a box of tissues and a workroom or office where the door can shut while you let those tears of frustration flow. We don’t judge.

Librarian Crush – Folks I’m loving right now

About to start our second week of school, and after the first 3 days of teacher planning week I’d just like to make a quick shout-out to some people who make a librarian’s heart very happy!

  • The new teacher, overloaded with moving continents with a family who came into the library and borrowed 4 books to be reading what her students are reading
  • The teachers who took it on blind faith and my raving that the Global Readaloud is something they should “sacrifice” class time for and agreed to participate for the first time this year.
  • The outdoor teacher who came to me to discuss what books and short stories we had that would be suitable to take on camp for reading aloud
  • My staff who worked like trojans to get the library looking wonderful for the start of the year – including cataloging piles of books that arrived during the summer “because the students would like to see something new”
  • The HOD who spoke up during a meeting to support the idea of reading aloud for at least 10 minutes before the start of all and any lessons (including the ones where teachers said “even in my (XXX) subject?”
  • People like Buffy Hamilton and Pernille Ripp who blog continuously and consistently about making reading and writing work in the Middle / High School classroom. Including admitting with humility when things don’t work.
  • People on twitter who engage in conversations about why students post-primary have stopped reading and how to re-ignite the passion for reading.
  • Departments and teams who think it’s not only necessary but normal to include the librarian in planning units.
  • Fellow librarians who are keeping in touch over long distances to brain storm how we’re going to make this a great year of engagement for our students and fellow faculty.

Happy Monday morning everyone – hope you all have a great week and a great year of sharing and reading.

How to WINN in the new school year

Part of my vacation time is usually spent doing personal learning and preparing for the new year for both my students and for how I can impact teaching and learning for teachers. Last year was my first in a new environment – both in terms of level (middle school rather than primary) and country/school (Beijing, China). This year I’m preparing with somewhat more hindsight and the fact that we have 12 new teachers starting. This post I’m going to focus more on how I hope to support teachers.

Last year, my predecessor very kindly typed up a long list of answers to my 100s of questions to help guide me in the new position. It’s something I refer to from time to time even further into the year. This year I compiled a “newbies” guide with the help and input of all my fellow (last year) new teachers, and the rest of the staff on the nitty-gritty things that we wish we’d known before starting. We sent it out into the world and based on the feedback added additional information. It seems to have had some success with 1,282 views since it was created in May. But it’s a lot of information to digest.

Today I stumbled on the videos (and book) of Nick Shackleton Jones via a tweet on a blogpost of his (yes, rabbit hole – but this time a good one). This has definitely changed my whole view on how to approach supporting teachers, and perhaps even how to work with students.

A brief summary of the takeaways of the videos

Part 1 – distinguish between content dumping (my newbie Libguide – and other Libguides) and performance support. In order to give performance support you need to understand / analyse what people are trying to do and provide resources that have DESIGN & UTILITY.

Find out from your audience WHAT I NEED NOW (WINN).

Part 2 – this session is particularly interesting for on-boarding and knowledge sharing. The basic elements are things that people need immediately (how to use the computer); advice from peers, understanding how things connect together; factsheets; one page guides; checklists.

Part 3 – discusses the affective (emotional) context of learning and how to alternate between providing resources (when the audience has a strong emotional response to the information) and experiences (when the emotional response / interest is lower). The 5Di design process is introduced (define, discover, design, develop, deploy & iterate). Of particular use in my context was the CONCERN-TASK-RESOURCES model. I think that is a great way of deciding what resources to focus on by working out the concerns of the audience, relating them to tasks and then providing the resources that can help with the tasks.

I can see this working really well for designing learning experiences for our Day 9s to ensure that they are student need rather than teacher driven.

So, what I thought I’ll do is during the newbie week and first week of teachers back have daily debrief sessions on a pop-in or digital basis called WINN where teachers can quickly and briefly address what their concerns or tasks are that they need immediate help with and to build up the resources they need. Pop in is easy enough, for the digital I’m thinking of using our “ask” function of Libguides that I just started populating at the end of last year, so that the questions can accumulate into a knowledge database.

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Here is a longer video on “how people learn” worth the 29 minute investment – and a link to the book “How People Learn : Designing Education and Training that Works to Improve Employee Performance” I have a small gripe on the “employee performance” part of the subtitle – as I think it’s pretty universally applicable – but I guess that’s his background.

Header Photo by Felix Staffler from Pexels

When to read what how

First a shout-out – if you’re an international librarian and reading this – please join the International Librarians Lead (inTLlead) moodle – it aims to bring together a repository of resources, ideas and discussions on everything to do with being a 21C librarian in a global setting. We have 195 members and growing.

Further to my post about the difficulty in getting the right pitch in nonfiction reading in middle school, the discussion continued with science teachers about what students read (or don’t – thanks youtube) and how scientific time at school is used. And this is something I find incredibly weird as a non-science teacher, non science-curriculum creator, but as a parent of two kids having gone through science in PYP, iGCSE and MYP and DP. They spend a LOT of time and energy on lab-reports. Which often, no matter how heavily it’s scaffolded (and believe me I’m yet to see a lab report assignment that’s not heavily scaffolded) but they don’t spend any time until the IB reading a scientific journal article. And then probably only if they’re doing an EE (extended essay) on a scientific topic. And the skills required may or may not be explicitly taught depending on whether the librarian gets a look in, and depending on the supervisor and how much time they have.

Does anyone else find this strange? I’m wondering if we could somehow create a phased cross-walk between popular science articles in various areas to the original research that gave rise to those media interpretations (or misinterpretations as the case may be). Phased as in the sense of starting with the LCD of the abstract and conclusion and working up to sample size, statistics chosen and interpreted, hypothesis, methodology, experiment (link to the dreaded lab report) etc.

Am I talking nonsense? I’m thinking something very graphic so it’s pretty obvious. Or they create the graphic. By the time they get to the IB or university they don’t have the time to both do the writing needed and learning the decoding skills surely we should start earlier?

Trust me I’m a …

I’ve had this vague feeling ever since I started in the middle school that I’m just not serving my population well on the research side of things. I’ve tried putting my finger on it in the past but the unease has been growing. It started with being dissatisfied with nonfiction and that we’re not doing enough to uncover what research really looks like. I’ve not blogged much this year – partly due to having a lot on my plate with moving schools and school section, but also by choice since there’s just been so much to process and I’m not sure if writing it would be the best option.

It’s now near the end of May and my unease has not abated. A few things are going much better – I’m slowing getting some more collaboration going between the library and the various subjects. Which in some ways leads to more soul searching on how to best serve our students. I think I’m beginning to better understand the problem, not that I’m any closer to a solution. danah boyd gave yet another amazing talk recently and here is the transcript: “Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation” – bigger words than I’m accustomed to blogging on, but please indulge me and read the link, as it’s a good, albeit scary read. In particular what struck me was her discussion of the “data void” because that is exactly the description for what I’m experiencing as a middle school librarian.

In primary life was relatively easy – students had their passions – dinosaurs and trucks and kittens and ocean life and their inquiries, the rainforest, energy, etc. and I had a plethora of resources, mainly print books that could explain things in a simple yet clear and age appropriate way.

My latest existential crisis is the result of a rather good collaboration with G8 Biology, where we’re trying to take some biological understanding of cells and make it relevant to your average 13/14 year old in the throes of puberty where everything is more interesting than cellular details. So the idea was to try and help them examine what’s going on at a cellular basis when they indulge in typical teen behaviour – eating, drinking, going to the spa, putting on sunscreen, using makeup, experimenting with alcohol or smoking/vaping, dyeing their hair etc. I’m gathering some basic background information in a Libguide so that they don’t get bogged down in a google blackhole.

But that pulls me into the rabbit hole instead as I try to find scientific information. With the teachers we’d already decided that any books we had were largely irrelevant content detailed and superceded by better online models and information. But what we needed now was good information tailored to the unit.

I started with what I thought would be something relatively simple – deodorants – nothing could be further from the truth. On the one hand you have Dr. Mercola, and his ilk, countless hysterical “health” bloggers; Huffington post and on the other, the 200 page report on the matter from the EU scientific commission. Then there was the Doctor in the Harvard review (via Credo) answering questions posed by her daughter and her daughter’s friends and her mother and neighbour. With some pretty definitive answers, but not a citation or reference to back up her views. I don’t think so. So I had to eliminate that as a potential source – Harvard or not, Doctor or not.

As boyd so perfectly puts it “One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material. YouTube is the primary search engine for people under 25. It’s where high school and college students go to do research. Digital Public Library of America works with many phenomenal partners who are all working to curate and make available their archives. Yet, how much of that work is available on YouTube? “

I had a similar problem when I was trying to find some nonfiction books on vaping and e-cigarettes – the books were merely adequate. In particular I was interested in at least one chapter, or even a page that dealt with the science of nicotine / of what’s going on in the lungs, the science. A few good images that didn’t just include pictures of the hardware of vaping! But there isn’t anything.

Where does that leave us as teachers and teacher librarians? Caulfield, who I highly respect for his work on information literacy, has come up with an alternative to CRAAP – SIFT

  • (S)TOP
  • (I)nvestigate the Source
  • (F)ind better coverage
  • (T)race claims, quotes, and media back to the original context

It makes sense, I liked it, but it sat a little uneasily with me, and after reading boyd, I understand why. What happens when you’re going through SIFT and you get to the F and find that there is no better coverage? This can be due to a number of reasons –

  • The gap between what is accessible at your level of understanding / education / language /
  • the preferred mode of access gap (see the comment on YouTube earlier)
  • the void between what I would call the “Goop press” (see this, and this) and science journals.
  • The chasm between what student friendly sources publish and what students are actually researching – anyone find anything really good on micro-plastics recently? – Not in any of the databases my school subscribes to…
  • The fact that even the most intelligent and well meaning teacher in my environment is loath to consider allowing students to use wikipedia (that will be a whole blog post on its own)

You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it. You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions (boyd).

In the mean time, I’m encouraging my teachers and students to use Beers & Probst’s Notice and Note for Nonfiction. At the very least I’m hoping that using it will give them a sense of unease. Of uncertainty, of wondering if what they are reading can be believed, and if not that if not now, at some point they’ll continue to mull over the topic and eventually be able to research it further, and if necessary change their minds or opinions on what they learnt back when they were in G8.