Who uses the databases?

Looking at the discussion about databases, it sounds like mine isn't the only district that pays for databases that no one seems to use. A few people mentioned today (July 20) that the lack of training for staff on how to use the resources is a major problem, especially considering the amount of money that must be spent on the databases. As Joanne indicated, this would be a good place for the CBAM model to be applied.

That's what I thought too, which is why is used it for my assignment 3. What I found, though, was not only did no one seem to use it, but no one seemed to know about it. As I explained in my discussion post, "When I asked the TL for the logins for the databases we have, she gave me ones for World Book and EBSCO, but said that she never uses either because EBSCO doesn't have much in French, and World Book is lacking Canadian content." I was worried when she said this, because the project I was going to suggest my colleague revamp was a research project about Canadian provinces. I didn't have a problem there, however, although this isn't necessarily a good indicator of Canadian content for areas like art and culture.

Another point: no where on the school website is mentioned the Encyclopedia of British Columbia, which we also get. I didn't know to ask about it when I did my project, but I found it on the district website when I was looking into databases further for the related lesson. The TL didn't mention it at all when I was talking to her, and I can't help but wonder why, if we're worried about Canadian content, we are not using it. It is at a higher reading level than is generally useful, but it would be still be worth knowing about, I would think.

It seems so unfortunate that educators are not able to use/willing to use/aware of these resources. For one thing, it doubles the amount of time you have to do library research during the week, because your computer lab periods are more useful than a dabble on Wikipedia.

Overall, I think, this is going to be one of the big ideas I take from this course. Ways to better use the internet for researching are available and valuable, and I intend to teach them to my students. This means not only the skills to use Wikipedia properly, but also all the other available tools and resources that we have (and that the district pays for!)

Good Practice for Historical Atlases

As I stated in my discussion post today (July 20), I don't think I've ever really seen a current atlas. I don't really use them in my everyday life, and the ones one sees in classrooms are generally "historical" to say the least. In French immersion classrooms, I'm pretty sure I recognize the same green atlases that I was using in grade 7.

When using atlases, class sets are often crucial to the kinds of activities we do. However, it would be extraordinarily expensive to replace this every 5 years, even if you don't have more than one set for the school, which you need to. Online resources would be great, but then we have to contend with access and the cost of that in the classroom environment.

What this makes me think, then, is this: is it still good practice to use historical atlases for regular use in the classroom? Certainly, it is necessary to have up-to-date information available in the library for when it is needed. When it comes to class sets, however, is it better to have something than nothing?

Realistically, the degree of detail required for classroom use is not often much. Additionally, the areas of the world we tend to study at the elementary level, let's be honest, are not the ones that are doing much of the changing. So long as we have Nunavut when we're looking at Canada, can we use atlases that should be considered historical and still consider it good practice for teaching geography? I'm not sure what I think is the best answer, but I do think I'll go on teaching kids to use maps with what I have, even it means explaining what USSR means.

Blame Game

There are many legitimate concerns about Wikipedia. There are also, however, many problems that are easy to blame on Wikipedia (or the resource at hand, but more often then not Wikipedia), but which are actually issues with our reference services. Jody mentioned a few of these when discussing her concerns with how she has seen Wikipedia used in the classroom as a TOC in her posting on July 3.

The first of these was when she said “I do not feel comfortable allowing it to be a starting point for my students’ research when most of them have not been taught the information literacy skills required to verify the information.” While the concern is very valid, I disagreed with the implication that this is a problem with using Wikipedia. The problem here is that students have not been taught the appropriate information literacy skills, something that is required for all research in all resources. Wikipedia does require a different technical skill set than print encyclopedias, but the lack of this in the program does not make Wikipedia a lesser resource. The fact that “Most of the time students turn towards Wikipedia as their first and sometimes only source of information” is a problem with library services and information literacy education, not Wikipedia. I responded applying this concern to the use of other research materials: “I am not comfortable having students use print encyclopedias or newspapers or textbooks either without the information literacy skills required to critically evaluate the information they are receiving. In fact, they should be taught these skills before being asked to apply them by being given a research assignment.”

The second was referring to the ease of plagiarism when using Wikipedia, something often mentioned when teachers have problems with how they students are doing their research. Perhaps it is faster to cut and copy from Wikipedia than to copy out a print encyclopedia, but conventional encyclopedias online have the same drawback. Realistically, if a student is going to plagiarise (either innocently because they have not been taught not to, or despite being taught not to), they will manage just fine out of any resource. It is unreasonable to list this as a drawback of Wikipedia.

Many of us find it difficult to trust Wikipedia for a variety of legitimate reasons. However, we need to be sure to separate this from things that students who are not information literate do wrong while using Wikipedia. Not doing so weakens the important concerns and issues that need addressing when using Wikipedia in the classroom.

How do we determine reliability?

I have found the discussion surrounding Wikipedia to be immensely interesting. As I have stated before, I like Wikipedia for school use, as well as acknowledge that it has limitations and potential problems. It is, however, quite difficult to make (and defend) the mental leap required to accept that Wikipedia can be reliable despite its disregard for conventional ideas of authority. I feel the need to couch my statements in this regard (as in my reply to Jody's posting on July 5), and the statements of others (such as the representatives from Britannica in the Bernstein article on the extreme end) seem to support this difficulty.

Personally, I think it's incredibly compelling to think that the way we conventionally define authority is not the only way attribute reliability to information. In this age of information (I cringe to use a buzz word, but it's a very telling description of our time) where data points and users are so numerous, we can count more heavily on probability. The iterations are so many that we have a statistically significant sample. As such, if we say that most people will do conscientious work on Wikipedia, then we can rely on most articles being conscientiously written. If many people are assessing, correcting, and evaluation articles, then we can rely on most errors being caught. With so many articles, maybe we can count on these probabilities enough to define a new kind of reliability. Maybe, we can depend on "surely someone will notice". I'm not saying that this is necessarily true, but we are redefining so many ways of thinking, and wouldn't it be fascinating? Wouldn't it be fascinating if this system that depends on millions iterations could be as reliable as "authority" as defined by Britannica?