Tag: search

The kids were right all along!

I’ve recently become old enough to qualify for senior discounts in many countries, but I’m relatively (10-12 years) young in my profession as a teacher librarian. Believe me when I say bringing a beginner’s mind to a new area of endeavour is not a bad thing.

I’ve been a long time fan of Mike Caulfield and his SIFT model and an equally long antagonist of the short-handed way we tend to look at source credibility through tools like CRAAP – something that should have died around the birth of smart-phones. I also thought we vastly under-estimate our students when we use CRAAP instead of SIFT in teaching information literacy.

And why do I like Mike Caulfield? Because he evolves. I think a version of James Dean’s “Live fast and die young and leave a good looking corpse” is important in education – to the extent of “try new stuff, listen a lot and let 13 year olds tramp over the corpses of what doesn’t work”

Kids are really good at short cuts, short attention spans and disdain for anything older than themselves. Any teacher / librarian who has spent 5 minutes teaching research has probably spent 100% of that time trying to teach key words and unteach students typing what they want to find in a search bar. I just have to laugh at this post that I wrote nearly 10 years ago!

Well, hallelujah – the kids were right all along. In this brave new AI world we find ourselves in, a typical teenager is probably more likely to hit on the right AI generated search result than the typical adult – including librarians with all their years of training. Unless of course they’re in the dreaded database environment (I’ve ranted enough about those in the past and will continue to do so in the future).

Key words are out and context is in. Relevance is built into a natural language search and the real work starts with getting the machine to refine results through prompts including “academic” or “reputable medical” or “journal article” etc, telling it to make comparative tables and do the first reading for you.

The way traditional search works is it knows your keywords but has a difficult time guess your search intent or need…
AI Allows You to Refine Source Relevance Before You Make the Jump, and That Changes Everything

Mike Caulfield – Look before you Leap

So now I’m giving you something to read, hop out of this blog and have a look at Mike Caulfield’s two latest posts in substack. “Look before you leap: How AI changes source verification and how SIFT will respond” and “A SIFT Rebuild (in progress)“

But bigger than all that is the question of why we persisted so long in thinking of young people’s academic search as being “wrong” and forcing them into the “key word” funnel instead of shouting louder that the way that databases are set up are wrong – and keeping on paying huge amounts for the privilege of being screwed?

Yes I know the answer – kind of – is content that has not been AI generated. But the “publish or perish” academic environment coupled with the reluctance to go back and redo / prove or disprove research should give anyone pause. And if you want some very intelligent, largely irreverent background on this, please go to the “Everything Hertz” podcast .

Things that are going to have to change – Britannica, Google Scholar, Gale, Infobase, JStor, Proquest – just to mention the ones in the G6-12 environment. Take your sales and development people out of their offices and put them in some schools, libraries and classrooms and take note. Of the frustrations, of the tiny 12 point font you’re using, of the clumsy design, user experience and interfaces. And stop increasing your prices until you’ve done so and done something about it.

Are we teaching dogs to chase cars?

I’d love a dollar for every time as a TL I’m asked to teach students “how to search” or “search terms” or “searching. Once upon a time I complied. I’ve become a bit more bolshie in my old age. I now try to engage. Engage in a conversation as to what exactly the teaching and learning aim is behind the request.

You see, we don’t need to teach dogs to chase cars. We need to teach them what to do with them once they’ve caught them. And we need to teach that bit first, so that they can decide with the right amount of information at their disposal that actually, cars are not edible and therefore not worth the chase.

I understand the impetus behind wanting to teach better searching. It comes from a good place. One which recognises that students are going to google anyway, it will probably be their first and last port of call and we may as well teach them how to use it better so at least the results somewhat resemble the information they’re looking for.

But without some kind of prior knowledge or context, how will they recognise what is in front of them for what it is? And without deep literacy skills, both on the reading and writing side, how will they do something with it? And why am I seeing two huge time sucks in student “research” – searching and gathering “information” and dressing it up in some kind of (digital) presentation form. aka, the dogs chasing the car and trying to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. Which leaves precious little time for the meat in the middle.

Am I overly cynical, or is this a more generic experience? And what can we / dare we do about it?

Information literacy – Beyond Search and Cite

Here is the presentation I gave at the Bangkok Librarian workshare last weekend.  Basically my argument is we shouldn’t start our conversations on information literacy with the choice of which model we’ll employ, but should take a step back to what our philosophy of learning is, and choose an IL philosophy accordingly.  This would then inform our standards and benchmarks (S&B) which need to take cognisance of the latest thought in the Threshold Concepts as they relate to IL so that we can incorporate these in our S&B and then, we can think about models and delivery.  Otherwise we get stuck with students who can go through the motions but will not be able to transfer concepts and practises between disciplines and from the school to the home / work / life setting.

Appreciate comments.

Day 1: Tech tip

The first on the challenge was to share a Tech tip.  Mine would be incorporating a library with a federated search into your google scholar through library links.

This was a tip shared by the NLB while I was on the study tour last year.

Here is a step by step guide:

1. Go to google scholar

 

2. On settings choose “library links”

 

3. In “library links” you add the library (up to five) where you have access to a journal database. In this case you can see I’ve added Charles Sturt University where I’m a student.

4. When you do a search, on the RHS you will see links to your library where you can directly (after putting in your password and ID) go to the article via your libraries database.