We are getting responses to our survey on the blog. Thank you to all of you who have made the time to take the survey. There is a lot of research going on right now regarding social networking and blogging in relation to education. Since we are an online University, I am quite interested in how these types of interactions may help support learning. The survey was developed to look at what works and what doesn't work from a more general perspective. Does reading someone's thoughts and process inform the reader on how to conduct research? Do students learn more than other's when reading this type of blog? So many questions and if I were to put them all in the survey we would have the longest survey in history :)
It seems that the more tools we have the more confusing learning becomes. We talk about scholarly sources in research, but when one Googles a topic there are a million things that come up. Some are scholarly, some help to understand a topic but aren't scholarly, and some are just "junk". I wonder how students navigate all those different resources. I also wonder which tools are most beneficial to learning and why. The research right now points to small studies where the blog is designed to work with students in a specific course. I am wondering if there isn't a way that blogs, twitters, facebooks, and the like, can actually help students to develop skill sets necessary to write dissertations, do research, and develop proposals.
We have so much information available on our computers...do we need to develop specific skill sets just to wade through it all?
MG
I would like to address the topic of learning how to sort through the "junk" that Dr. Giles brought up. For the last year or so, I've taught classes in technical writing and English composition to freshman students online. The hardest aspect of the class for many of them is learning to distinguish whether an Internet source is credible or not. Most are very savvy at network searches and finding information, but almost completely ignorant about whether it's reliable or not.
ReplyDeleteCritical thinking skills are taught in a separate class at that school, but the students don't seem to think about applying them to their other classes. In any kind of research, you need to be very careful to evaluate your sources with a critical eye, and it takes a little bit of insight to do that on the Internet.
First, it helps to know that most search engines, such as Google, use algorithms that weight the degree with which a particular site matches your query. That means that they will try to find pages that have all of the terms or words in it that you specify. But--and this is a *big* but--those algorithms also weight answers according to how often they've been search by others, by how often that page is linked to by other pages, and sometimes by how much a particular company or site pays to have its pages weighted high. In other words, it's a popularity contest, not a scientific scrutiny.
The result is that most searches return links that are popular, interesting, or scandalous, or that give information a company wants you to hear as the top searches. You will see a lot of stuff from Wikipedia, About.com, and similar encyclopedic sites, most of which is of dubious scientific value--and in the case of Wikipedia, may be wildly *inaccurate*. Second, you may get a lot of personal pages, which are often rants or lists of things someone likes about a topic, but are just personal opinions. Third, even if you get a magazine or newspaper's pages, you have to check whether the article is an opinion piece or a blog from one of the reporters; these are often *also* expressions of personal opinion more than news.
Copyright information for a page is generally given at the bottom, along with who owns the site. If you find this, you can get answers to the 2nd and 3rd cases, and make sure that you're not getting information that is decades old and inaccurate.
I find that blogs, such as the one we are doing here, tend to be interesting, but not so much good sources of data for scientific research. The posts do contain the authors' experiences, but also the authors' thoughts, feelings, opinions, biases, and other factors a critical researcher would weed out if using it for research. Tweets are even more worthless, as they are pure "opinion haiku." I'm terribly saddened by the fact that many "news" sources are relying on such sites, because they do not represent objective journalism. They just spread gossip.
Finally, be really careful of social networking sites and pages posted there. These are almost always someones' personal thoughts and opinions, and are not of sufficient clarity for critical use.
Be really skeptical about information you find over the Internet. Not only is there no one checking to see whether information posted there is accurate or not, chances are the first page or so of links you get back from a search are going to be biased or *inaccurate*. Information on the Internet also never, ever goes away--I've found stuff I posted back in the late 1980s still out there! Take the time to carefully review the site, look at the "about us" section, check copyrights, and think about what kind of information you're reading. Then, if you can make a reasoned judgment that the information is accurate, timely, and useful, use it. But it's really faster to start with the library and search through peer-reviewed journals, rather than have to wade through the "junk" in the first place!
The best way to sort through the sites you get back from a search is to look at the extensions on the URL, which is the http:// line shown underneath the site description in the search engine. Most have a three-letter extension at the end that gives you a good clue as to the likelihood of the site being useful in research:
ReplyDelete.COM is always a commercial site. That means that it may be a newspaper or magazine, but that it is typically for the general public, and often trying to sell you something, even if that is only an opinion.
.EDU is an educational site, usually a college or university. Generally, this material is more trustworthy and usually accurate, but check to see whether the page is a professor's class notes or a published paper to determine its level of trustworthiness. (Notice that all of our emails end in .EDU? That indicates that we're part of Walden University.)
.GOV is a US Federal government organization, whose pages you can generally trust. The information may be dull as dishwater, but it's usually accurate, and the government organization or department that publishes the site stands behind the information. State sites usually have the two-letter state abbreviation before the .gov, as in ".CA.GOV" for California state government sites. Other countries typically have a two-digit country code, such as ".UK.GOV" for British government sites.
.ORG indicates a 501c3 non-profit organization's site. These can provide accurate information, but be clearly aware that many of them have a strong bias or slant towards one political perspective or another, as the different parties use them to promote their ideas.
MoveOn.ORG is a progressive non-profit, for example, while the CatoInstitute.ORG is a libertarian-conservative non-profit. If you were researching a controversial topic, such as whether older recipients of Medicare use more than their "fair share" of Medicare funds, you would get very different answers from each of these sites. So if you use a .ORG site, do some additional research to determine whether and what its bias might be. Just because you agree with it doesn't mean it isn't biased.
.MIL indicates a US military web site. You generally won't run into many of them unless you're doing classified research, but that's what that extension means. At least in terms of research, you can generally trust what .MIL sites post, but it may not be the whole story.
Other extensions tend to be somewhat frivolous methods of making .COM sites stand out. Use with caution.
One of the things we're learning as graduate students is how to find peer-review journals, and research material that has been subjected to peer-review. This is considered the "gold standard" in scientific research, and you typically find this material using searches through Walden's library, not just on the Internet.
If you haven't started doing so, make a list of the peer-reviewed journals in which you frequently find papers for projects. Go to sites like http://www.apa.org, which is the American Psychological Association's site, and look through its divisions and publications. These are all good sources of information that you can trust.