Tag: information

I’m Falling Behind My Questions

Racin' Snails 2

I long ago gave up on examining all the information available to me. I’m slowly coming to accept I haven’t the time or focus to examine all the information that interests me either. The piles of books littering my home and office along with the dozens of articles I’ve currently got open across multiple devices are evidence I might be more curious than I have time for.

When I started talking with and coaching educators on building a conceptual framework for managing information flow as they started to utilize digital tools, my advice was to focus on those topics about which they were most interested. Now, that reasoning only stands to serve intensely acurious individuals.

Every question I can pose has a corresponding rabbit whole waiting for me to jump. Each of those books and open articles is a map of where I intend to jump – later. I don’t know that later will ever come. Not for all of them.

I will never have time to read and consider the answers to all of my questions. They are too many and the sources of information more multitudinous still.

Faced with the question of how to deal with an overflow of information now, my answer is to focus on the answers you need in the moment, and decide if free time is worth dedicating to new information or reflecting on the learning you’ve already done.

Given the effect of a full cognitive load, the answer might be none of the above. Folks might opt to zone out and let information settle. As much as I love learning and swoon over inquiry, the infinite information stream also calls for quietly doing nothing of consequence so that I can better appreciate the consequences of those answers I decide are worth chasing.

I know all of this, and yet I still pick up more books for which I can’t conceive finding the time or open yet another collection of interesting browser tabs. Because, maybe, I’ll get around to it as soon as I’ve read everything else.

86/365 We Must Practice a New Research

Time used to be that you knew what research meant when a teacher announced to the class that they’d be conducting it. The library would be reserved (God only knows what would happen if more than one group of students were in there at once). The librarian could be counted upon to deliver the perfunctory “Here’s How We Use the Library” speech. And, the class would be released to find the handful of books related to their respective topics.

For those in high school who took an old school approach, research also means a plethora of notecards – source cards, quote cards, outline cards. Cards galore.

It was a simpler time, a calmer time, and, quite frankly, a better time for notecard manufacturers.

Say research now, and any myriad of scenarios run through students’ heads. Maybe a library is involved. Maybe they turn to their phones. Maybe it’s a computer lab or laptop cart. Perhaps it’s both. If it’s the latter, an Internet connection is handy, but the options only open from there. Will students use the simplified per-for-use services? Will they Google? Will they plagiarize? Will the teacher catch on?

The possibilities are endless.

Research is different now.

The schools we need see research questions as “what” and “how”.

To accomplish this, they must work to make sure teachers know how to find felicitous answers in any landscape. This doesn’t mean another seminar on how to use the latest subscribtion database. Teachers are as likely to pay attention to the intricacies set out for them as students are. Helping schools be centers of research means helping teachers develop the habits of practice that help them to make informed and efficient decisions within an information landscape.

All of this should be driven by the same things we hope for students – inquiry and projects worth completing.

Schools working to become learning organizations are asking questions. Their teachers have ideas and questions as to what need be done to improve the teaching and learning of the space, and they are asked to do generative work that moves practices forward.

Teachers as researchers in the now are much more likely to be better teachers of researchers at the same time.

Presented with the staid practices of notecard-based research or any derivatives thereof, students are likely to notice (and rightly so) that they’re being presented with strategies that ask them to devolve what are likely highly complex methods for tracking down information.

Instead, we must realize we are beyond being beholden to what can be found from a single source. Hypertextual sources mean students are able to track from one source to another to another ad infinitum. Anyone who’s jumped down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia knows this to be true.

The “how” and “what” question is ever more important.

In helping students to be researchers, teachers must pose and invite inquiry around some key questions:

What information is relevant to what I want to know?
What information is irrelevant to what I want to know?
How will I know the difference?
What kinds of places might hold interesting knowledge about my questions?
Whom might I want to access to better understand my interests?

Some key components about these questions should jump out immediately. In a super-informed space, it isn’t only about what information can be found, it is important to consider which information is both relevant as well as interesting. When we were counting on the five books from the library, we needn’t discern between what is interesting and what wasn’t. It was a seller’s market and we took notes on every mundane fact we could find to be able to reach our page requirement.

Contemporary researchers are flush with relevant and irrelevant as well as interesting and uninteresting information. Teaching to make the distinction is key.

Books also held us to their author’s page-contained views on a topic or a journalist’s one-off article on an event. Contemporary researchers have access to people as well as ideas. In asking whom they might want to contact, students are more likely to consider how they might leverage social technologies to communicate with sources in real time. From email to twitter, students can publish a report Friday that includes information from an interview Wednesday.

Research today must ask better questions with respect to the “how” of the questions we’re asking. It must also allow teachers to practice the kinds of information-gathering and synthesis they’re asking of students. Such an ecosystem is one driven not only to ask complex questions, but to craft complex answers as well.

52/365 What Do These Pictures Do to Inform our Conversations about Race?

In a recent class, a colleague was describing the Chicano civil rights movement here in Colorado. As she detailed the events, she ended with, “…and then it went nationwide.”

I paused for a moment. Why hadn’t I heard about this movement when I was growing up in Central Illinois? Had it truly gone nationwide?

Then I got curious as to what the Hispanic population looked like by the numbers near my hometown. I’d several friends who identified as Hispanic when I lived in Florida, but couldn’t remember any from my time in Illinois. I took to the Internet. Here’s what I found:

Hispanic PopulationIt seemed from this picture that I had a reason why the movement going nationwide hadn’t resonated as profoundly in the Midwest. This got me curious. Here’s what else I found:

American Indian PopulationAnd…

African-American PopulationAnd…

Asian PopulationThese were things I could probably have described generally if handed a blank map and asked to color in the distribution. It wasn’t until I started considering these maps with regard to the “national” conversations we have about race, ethnicity, and culture I’ve witnessed and participated in as I’ve moved around the country. Some things I’m thinking:

  • While general patterns of cultural dominance and oppression appear regularly across the map, the cultures in question, how they interact, and how they shift those patterns is vastly different.
  • A person with limited geographic mobility living in any of these spaces of greater density of the ethnicities reported above is likely to live with a skewed perception of race in America and limited access to people of other backgrounds, thereby limiting the fulfillment of Allport’s Contact Hypothesis.
  • When we talk about race in America, we’re all having different conversations and are rarely aware of those differences.
  • Integration, equity, and civil rights are going to require varied approaches if we are to find that “more perfect union” we talk about so much.

If I were in a social studies classroom, I’d be building a unit around these maps and the questions they raise for my students and me. If I were in an English classroom, I’d be asking how these distributions might influence my selection of texts and how I approached helping students access them. If I were leading a school, I’d open a faculty meeting with these images and ask how they might help us think about how we are preparing students for the larger world and their citizenship in it.

And, I’d throw one more map into the mix to make it interesting…

Poverty

 

 

 

 

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, isn’t art class more valuable than reading?

A few weeks ago, some friends and I visited Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. I did there what I do each place I’m asked to view contemporary art. I looked at each piece for a few seconds, read the accompanying artist’s or curator’s statement thoroughly, and then looked back to the art thinking, “Oh, that’s what they meant to say. Of course!”

This is my way with contemporary art.

It is not, in any way, how I encounter printed words.

In middle school, reading a textbook, I skipped the graphs, the charts, and the tables. I read the words. I’m not sure why I thought those other pieces were there. Filler, maybe?

It’s worked out pretty well so far. Being able to read and manipulate text is the lingua franca of school and the wider world.

Yesterday, I found myself arguing for the opposite. In my Digital Humanities course, I tried to push and pick at people’s thinking around the necessity or sanctity of text.

My thesis is this: Information is equally imperfectly served through transmission via text as through transmission via graphics.
Images, though, don’t have equal footing when we think about reading and literacy. The two terms ellicit images of words, phrases, sentences – verbage.

But they don’t need to, and I’m starting to wonder if we’re not doing ourselves and our students a disservice by putting the premium on the ability to read text.

We lose not only the ability to create and read images, but the comfort and habits of mind that accompany this way of seeing the world as well.

Though the gallery was utterly silent on my trip to the ICA, each image was screaming with the artists’ ideas and commentary. I just had no tools for how to read and understand their language.