Robin Talkowski’s Blog

How quickly do you click on a link when your search results pop on the screen?  How quickly do your students “click?”  If your experience is like mine, students have already clicked off the page before I have finished looking at what is there.  (Many of my younger colleagues do the same.)  Often students will click on the first link that “kind’a” looks good without really looking at the description and the source.

The New Literacies group terms this skill:  Locating Information Using Search Engines.  This is similar to helping students understand what type of resources they should look in to find certain types of information.  For example, use an almanac if you want to find the average rainfall in Tanzania. Try an encyclopedia to get an overview of a topic.  Search Engines make the search task so much easier to find information, while simultaneously, making it more difficult to find the exact information you want.

The new reading research skills that students need involves understanding how search engines report out search results.  Which sites have paid for their location on the page?  What does the url tell us about the type of site it is and whether the site creators are trying to sell something.  Taking these extra steps to preview and evaluate search results takes additional time just as previewing a textbook chapter takes extra time; however, it is time well spent for it may well save time in the long run.  The best way to teach this to students may be conducting mini-experiments by giving students a question to answer and seeing which approach results in the answer most quickly.  Unless students can see that taking a minute to look through search results to find the best possible sources will actually save them time, I doubt they will move from “click click .. click.”

Don Leu and his research team at the University of Connecticut identified key skills needed for reading on the internet.  These skills are termed the New Literacies.  I thought I would look at each of these skills and compare and contrast them to traditional reading instruction.  The first skill identified is: Identify Important Issues or Problems.  This skill appears to be the equivalent of Setting a Purpose before reading.  Students need to know what they are reading to discover.  When conducting research on the internet, it is even more important to know what the purpose of the research is.  A click here and there on links may yield some interesting information or fun sites, but does it relate to the issue or problem being researched?  This different context makes clarity of purpose even more important.

Recently, I heard Don Leu and his research team from the University of Connecticut share their ideas and research about the new reading comprehension and learning skills needed for effective internet research.  Leu and his team identified the following skills as key:

“Identify important questions or problems.

Locate information using search engines.

Critically evaluate online resources for accuracy and reliability.

Synthesize information across texts.

Communicate information using email, blogs, instant messages, wikis, Nings, social networking sites, and other media.”

This presentation started a quest to understand this topic and learn how and what to teach today’s digital consumers.  The New Literacies Research Team at UConn provides a great starting point.  It provides resources and links to understand the ways in which our more traditional reading instruction needs to change to teach the skills our students need for survival in this digital age.