Learning and Leading - September/October 2010

Developing Info-Seeking Fluency

after 15 years of Web experience, I’m pretty good at finding information on the Internet using mainstream search engines such as Google. But sorting through the clutter of links can be a real challenge for inexperienced students. How can you help your students clear a path to relevant information?

I developed a framework that I call the Info-Seeking Fluency Framework, designed to develop students’ skills for coming up with effective search queries. It is also designed to embrace— instead of ignore—the digital nature of information today by taking advantage of three major sources of online media:

Networked and social resources. These are the connections and communications students may form with experts, peers, and other “netizens” through social spaces, such as discussion forums, social networks, and instant messaging.

Read/write/remix resources. These include many Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, and video-sharing websites. These sites are responsible for the abundance of information online. They differ from the previous group because they are categorized by media format (document, page, video).

Traditional “trusted” resources. These include paid-for resources, such as online databases of journal articles and encyclopedias.

Let’s take a look at how to develop fluent information seekers as outlined in NETS for Students Standard 3. The research methodologies that are typically taught in schools are focused on research projects. Students might start with research problems, develop hypotheses, search for information, and then formulate conclusions about

Infoseeking Fluency Framework
Research Need
Media
Sharing

By John Hendron

what they have learned, citing the best sources of information. That’s fine, and the Info-Seeking Fluency Framework can help students succeed with those types of rigorous projects.

But students today have access to the Internet 24/7, which means they crave access to all sorts of facts. Whether it’s big-picture questions or something more trivial, it all begins with a blinking cursor in a search field.

I ask students to collect a lot of material—more than they would need to answer simple questions—distill the essence of that information, and label it with their own keywords or tags. That way, they are practicing the very skills that will enable them to do higher-level inquires. Here’s the process:

1. Students make some guesses about what to search for.

Library Bucket

2. They conduct the search.

3. They click on the results and briefly evaluate the source material. If it looks passable, they copy it. If not, they leave it alone.

4. They paste the material (text or pictures) into a “bucket.” Buckets might be a blog post, a wiki page, a spreadsheet, or a word processing document—anything digital.

5. Students record the precise location where their source material came from: an MLA citation, a Web URL, etc.

6. Students repeat the collection process. It doesn’t matter if they find similar information from another webpage, article, or video. Repeats are good.