Today’s workshop at ACTEM doesn’t start until this afternoon, so I have an hour to kill, and Candace Hackett Shively has taken care of that for me. She commented on a recent post about David Weinberger’s comparison of the Wikipedia and The New York Times — A WOW Moment…
Candace says that the nature of authority and academia is an important one, but she asks a very practical question.
…How do we ease eight year olds into understanding that no single source is truly “authoritative”? The question of authority should certainly come into the educational process, but at what point are children ready to handle it? Note that I say children, not youth.
…snip…
So where or when do we say to children,”consider the idea that no single source is THE source” ? Do we ever say that attiribution is one way of determining authority? If not, how do we help YOUNG students begin to develop the literacy they need to survive as critical consumers of information? What are the baby stepsto lead a concrete thinker into an age-appropriate, “starter” litera
Gmail – [2 Cents Worth] Comment: “A WOW Moment — Up Early in the Morning”
I have something to say on the matter, but I must admit, first, that I have almost no experience at teaching primary level children. I couldn’t do it. So as far as any formal understanding of readiness, I am sitting out in left field. I’m comfortably here. I have my own furniture.
I think that it is important that we try NOT to teach that “no one source is THE source”. Instead, we should simply teach that source is important. In the primary grades, it has very little to do with citations, and more to do with the conversations that are already happening. If a teacher stands in front of his class and says that the world is like this, or grocery stores are like this, then that teacher is teaching his student to assume the authority of THE source. However, if the teacher says that according to this source, this person, or this logic, the world is like this, or according to Sally Johnson, the manager of our Piggly Wiggly store, grocery stores provide this… — and that is part of every conversation, then the teacher is teaching students that the the source of the information is as important as the information itself.
This is a good conversation. Anyone want to contribute?
technorati tags:warlick, education, literacy, literacy21
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“Instead, we should simply teach that source is important.”
No, because then they would think that the source is important. Which it’s not.
But you’re on the right track, I think. What they need to be able to do is to evaluate for themselves, to determine for themselves whether or not to accept as true (or relevant, or whatever) the item, regardless of source.
I would attempt to instill this behaviour by modeling it. By – for example – reading items from the newspaper or the web (yes, even for the young; newspapers these days are written at a grade 5 level) and musing out loud, “I wonder whether that’s true,” and then (still musing out loud) pondering the sorts of things that would make one think it’s true or false.
Transparency of process is important. That is why, for example, I posted my series of articles on installing Ruby on Rails. The idea wasn’t simply to describe Rails, but to show how you have to think when you’re doing a task of this sort. Seeing how I use Google to support this task is better than any explanations or descriptions I could offer.
How not to start: Okay kids, today we are going to learn about how your Mommies have lied to you. Guess what? There is no Santa Claus! So, next time you are on the Internet, remember that if Mommy can lie to you…why would you trust Wikipedia?
The day of the September 11 attack I was teaching 4th/5th graders on the west coast. The students began arriving and some had heard about what had happened and others had not. We did a simple activity on the whiteboard in which we drew a vertical line down the center of the board. On one side we wrote statements that we knew were true–“planes had hit the WTC towers.” On the other side we wrote statements that we had “heard” but that we couldn’t know were true–“there was a plane coming to our city.” We talked about where we heard the statements, whether from radio or television, a friend, an adult, etc. We continued with these lists throughout the week to help us define what we knew versus what was just speculation. Different statements got moved from one side to the other as the week unfolded as well. We talked a lot about our “sources” and if we could trust them or not. It was a simple activity, but it had the benefit of helping us deal with the issue on one level and keep us from undue speculation. One doesn’t need that kind of an event (obviously) to do this activity either. My intent wasn’t to look at sources during that time, but rather to help the kids understand that not everything we hear is true, but sources became an issue over the course of the week.
As part of their “thinking toolbox” children need to be encouraged to develop a healthy scepticism towards information. We taeach them now to verify their information – whether it be web based, newspaper of book – or even teacher.
As a fundamental part of the process of becoming competent users of information, children need to have the time and incentive to think about, play with, discuss and analyse information. The model provided by Wikipedia – post -discuss – edit is the same model kids should be getting comfortable with intheir own learning environment.
I’m not sure if it’s a matter of “how” to teach children about not being so reliant on the single authoritative source, but when. I see a strong similarity in this discussion with those that argue against curriculum compaction. Third graders usually find themselves studying the earth, moon, sun, and sometimes planets. However, cognitive research has shown that students don’t really start to develop working understandings of objects and concepts that they can’t physically see or touch until much later in their academic careers (around middle school for most).
The same can be said about seeking authority. To many children in their pre-school years, their parents are the authoritative source. Other sources may be acknowledged (friends’ parents, teachers, other adults), but not truly assimilated as an acceptable authority (don’t listen to strangers). If I recall my educational physchology classes well enough, Piaget himself conducted research which questioned how children saw authority. Many children were so fixated on rules and authority, that some even believed that rules created by adults were unbreakable. While we know it’s a bit more sophisticated and varied than that now, Piaget’s stages suggest that students aren’t even capable of true abstract thought until age 11. Until then they are very much stuck in a “concrete” state of mind and just beginning to realize that rules and authority is flexible depending on the situation.
But let’s put theory aside, what about some good old fashioned antecdotal evidence. I have, and continue to experience even 5th graders that tell me “Google told me that the answer to your question about Christopher Columbus is …” With trouble even distinguishing between what a source is, and the tool they used to find it, accepting multiple authorities seems a long way off; Google is already the authority! And that’s from students who have been in school for a few years, have undergone a number of exercises and activities in which they had to pull information from a number of different resources. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t be teaching them to recognize different authorities, or even to accept them, but rather it’s difficult when the authorities they’re seeking aren’t even human (at least not to their eyes), and carry all of the look, feel, and pertinent information that signals to them “look you further, you have found the answer.”
Then again, perhaps it’s the way we’ve taught for so long. You’ve solved the math problem Jimmy, great go on to the next one. Jimmy now knows taht his way is the authority on solving math problems. What about asking Jimmy to talk with his group and find two other ways to multiply numbers from students in his class. Even if he comes away from the time spent working on other people’s methods with the thought that he is the authority, he still knows that others see things differently. In a way, many teachers “teach” students to find that single authority and keep using it until it stops; THEN try looking someplace else. I’m guilty of it myself, asking students to completely exhaust a website, to squeeze every drop of information from it, until they move on to look at another site for more information.
Great thoughts to put out there Dave, I can see that I have lots of thinking left to do on this one.
Great conversation! This is an area that really interest me as I’ve been researching it for my eventual dissertation.
Dr. John Cuthell and I have been collaborating in researching child development and ICT for some time and have a working concept called Cybernetic Developmental Theory, which is primarilary based upon Piaget, but not limited to. Hence, CD Theory includes other learning theories within the framework based upon detailed classroom observations. Regarding authority and ICT, children typically don’t start questioning authority until the ages of 9-11 depending on overall IQ ( i.e.general intelligence). Questioning authority and/or sources on the internet typically starts at age 11 when abstract thinking typically starts. These skills can be scaffolded if the child is in the zone of proximal development ( i.e. Vygotsky). If they are not within ZPD, these skills can not be scaffolded.
I have a wiki on it, but it probably won’t be up for long. Per the Wiki Not page it says, “Wikipedia isnot a publisher of original thought” amoung other things.
Here’s the url:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cybernetic_Developmental_Theory
and here’s the Wiki Not page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOT
I’m glad that I looked it up again. I hadn’t looked at the wiki in a while. It’s a busy school year.
Cheers,
Mechelle : )
P.S. I thought of deleting my wiki, but then thought it would be interesting to see how long it will take to get to the wiki graveyard. The wiki process is very interesting. Thanks for posting Weinberger’s speech. It’s interesting.
Mechelle : )
David this is a great question. I can only think of a story to respond. My seven year old and I were reading a book about engineers the other day and one chapter was about George Stepehenson. In the chapter there were a series of dates that contradicted each other. One gave his date of birth as 1842 and then later on said he did something else in 1823. We had a great discussion about this and about the whole process of verification. My daughter had no trouble understanding that a mistake had been made and it was no problem for her to understand that we would need to look at another source to check and see what another publisher had said.
For me the point of this “teachable moment” is the development of a critical literacy about information. We didn’t have this discussion yet but the next step is to talk about trustworthiness of the publisher. This is where an examination of wikipedia vs Britannica can easily come in.
I think back to good old Mr Bloom and his taxonomy…. What was that last thinking skill at the higher end of the spectrum….. Oh thats right, evaluation…. One of the skills we don’t teach so well because we are too busy teaching the content and getting the little monkeys to repeat what they just learnt. If students are expected to evaluate their information or their learning they can’t help but be lead to wondering “where did this come from?” and “Is it true?” “What do I base my beliefs on what is true?”
Don’t underestimate the power of young students to tackle these issues.
I’m with Stephen…modeling, modeling, practice, practice. I think we could gain a lot of ground with kids if we start early to show them websites with the information we need then explain to them why this is a good site, what we need to focus on, does it answer the questions we have, what other sites have similar information, compare the information on several sites. We model this same kind of thing in picking out a book, why not with a website? Brett’s point is also good. Just because they’re young doesn’t mean that they don’t have the capacity to think about what they’re seeing and learning.
I am very much in favour of encouraging students to challenge authority by pushing something to absurd limits. A great example of this was when I managed to get students to start questioning official statistics (eg on unemployment) by making them work out what was wrong with the following story from Irish comendian Dave Allen, whose trademark was to sit on a stool on stage drinking whiskey whilst he told his jokes:
“According to recent statistics, 10% of car accidents are caused by drunk drivers. That means that 90% are caused by sober drivers. So why don’t you lot get off the road and let us drunks drive in safety?”
This is an interesting conversation and school library media specialists have been incorporating authority and source into their information literacy lesson with kids long before internet was available in schools. No one paid much attention to us – but now everyone is seeing the importance of authority and source. Finally! There is a game that we played as children called “Gossip”. Everyone sits in a circle or a line. The starter whispers a lengthy sentence int the ear of the person sitting next to him/her. Then that child repeats the sentence into the ear of the next child – whispering all the way. The last child in line (or in the circle) repeats the sentence out loud. OF course, the initial sentence has changed in both content and meaning depending on what each child thought they heard. Often the last child blurts out something completely unintelligible and it is never the same as the original sentence. This game is all about source and authority. It is a great way to teach little kids that information changes, that information is subject to interpretation, that your source is probably not right or accurate etc. It was used when we were small to warn us about the dangers of gossip. But it could just as easily be used today to lead kids to a discussion about source and authority. Plus – it is FUN!. Kids like the game, it requires no tools or props. It can take an hour or just a few minutes depending on the number of kids and the number of times you want to go around. It dosn’t always need to be a “lesson”. Kids learn a lot from games.
David, going to go out on a limb for a moment and both agree and disagree with you. But only on the surface, because at the deeper levels I’m head-nodding with you the entire time.
One, whether source IS or IS NOT important, I’m not sure ultimately matters to a young child in the way we consider source in a traditional academic sense. But great storytellers sure do mean something to kiddos.
Two, while literacy certainly demands a sense of textual origins to fully master the gift we humans are granted, 8 year olds have been told for several years to let go of the great ‘evaluative tool’ (thanks to the good soul who brought up Bloom’s Taxonomy in this comment string, BTW) that they were born with: questions, questions, questions. School has a funny way in those early years of asking kids to stop focusing on asking great (albeit sometimes off on a wild tangent or two) questions, and to only focus on answers. Focusing on the original author is in essence focusing on the original ‘answer’. Accurate, perhaps, but hardly inspired. Now, a 5 year old’s out-of-thin-blue-air question on the other hand? Inspired. Wondrous. Inventive. And ripe for learning…if we’d only follow their lead. And maybe ask, gently, “Mmm, do you think anyone has talked about that before? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to tell the story of what we find and also say their name as someone who ‘taught’ us along the way? And do you think they might show us other stories and paths also?”
Three, kids get it: be nice, tell the truth, say nice things about people who do nice things, and tell where you heard a great story in the first place. They do source instinctively. Everytime they get off the bus and say, “Did you hear what Timmy said…?” They are source-junkies. But we turn them into answer/paper-nomads, instead. And then they get bored with citation exercises that are out of context, that have no story-telling value, that do not capture their hearts and souls. We turn it into academic exercises destined for dusty academic halls in dusty academic corridors in some far-off dusty academic campus.
Four, a few centuries ago, the vast majority (aside from monks writing the few hand-crafted texts available to anyone) of we took much for granted in terms of original sources. We trusted those that we knew. We didn’t trust the others. We nodded when great storytellers walked us through tales. We believed in authorities. The only difference with Google today is that we are the storyteller, we are the authority, and we are the ones who get to decide how information is woven together into an ever-changing web of ideas. Pluto’s latest planetary ranking suggests that ‘facts’ and ‘authority’ are always up for debate. Sure, kids mistake Google for original source, but they’re using Google in a verb tense, in a process tense, in a discovery tense, in a curiosity sense. They aren’t mistaking citation because its not about citation for them. It’s about the story that keeps unfolding.
Five, perhaps if we spent less time bowing our heads to the traditional book citation as the end-all-be-all of research and academics for our youngest learners, and instead invited them to become conversational peers with the authors that they found in their learning journies, allowed them to be two-way blog-spirits with the bibliography voices rather than just rule-memorizers of the latest ALA guide, we might find that they ‘get it’ and will end up learning in a way we’ve never before dreamed.
Or maybe the view from the limb isn’t as hard-wired into the original ideas you sparked as some of the other commentors, David. I’m playing around with language here on a Friday afternoon, but perhaps there is something messy in there somewhere. Your post, certainly. My comment, perhaps.
Cheers,
Christian
Great question, interesting responses. I am in my 16th year of teaching 8 and 9 year olds, so if my response seems a little concrete, well please forgive me. It is just that the world in which I immerse myself daily is so concrete.
Kids at that age are at a delicious edge, in terms of abstract thought. It is a delightful dance at times. It is part of my duty as a teacher to push my kids toward that edge and abstract thinking, regularly. They like swimming around in it, but there is this overwhelming wish, most of the time, to just have ONE answer. It is comforting, and it allows growth when students can take a deep breath and say, “Good, so now I know this to be true. Now, I wonder about this…?” You have to have something under your feet.
Previous commentors were very right to talk Piaget, developmental theory, etc. One just can’t say “we need to teach all elementary aged schoolchildren sources”. That learning will happen, if the teacher provides the guidance, when the child is developmentally ready to truly understand.
A task analysis of “evaluates sources” would lead one to a prerequisite (in my opinion) understanding of ownership, and not long after that, copyright. It’s a complex, slippery slope. There are no exact ages when these sorts of skills need to be taught – well, maybe there are, but I sure do not hear authorities speaking loudly on the subject right now.
It is my 2 cents that those authorities ought to include classroom teachers, the daily practitioners with the most direct experience – not just theoriticians and university professors – because children are changing right now.
Andrew, I total agree with your statement:
“It is my 2 cents that those authorities ought to include classroom teachers, the daily practitioners with the most direct experience – not just theoriticians and university professors – because children are changing right now.”
I teach special education during the day and am also working toward my doctorate along the way. My mentor from the UK was also a classroom teacher for many years.
However, many US professors of education have never taught children in a K-12 setting so they don’t know the realities of teaching and the day to days such as lunch and bus duties, IEP meetings etc. I think we should have a more apprenticeship model of education for future teachers…but I digress.
Being a special education teacher, I am case manager and help with the inclusion students as well. Classes today, not only are changing with regard to technology, but with inclusion.
Great points made Andrew. I agree that classroom teachers ought to be included. Thankfully with the internet teacher voices are now being heard.
Cheers,
Mechelle : )
I do have experience working with and observing in elementary classrooms using technology and I have some strong thoughts about it. I love the description that Sean Sharp gave about September 11th. There are so many teachable moments that would lend themselves to this sort of thing. Second and third graders are not going to do research papers with multiple sources. They do not have the experience to even evaluate a source and so we have to scaffold it for them. The main issue to me is that TEACHERS need to know how to authenticate sources and notice when there is a teachable moment. There are some great examples above. Too many teachers that I know still put most of their trust in books (or Google, or Ask Jeeves) themselves and so their students are not getting the modeling needed.
I observed a student in a fourth grade classroom who was doing some research on the Blackfoot Indians. She went to Google and typed in Blackfoot Indians. Up came thousands of hits. She had NO tools to evaluate those hits, none. The first hit was a Catholic site about their work with the Blackfoot Indians. Another site was a project done by other students. I asked the fourth grader if she knew what Catholic was. She had no idea. I asked her if she thought that a site done by other students would be a good source. She was not sure. Neither was I. It might be a great source, but how long would it take a 4th grader to decide whether it was accurate or not? I think it was a waste of time for her to be searching in this way. In this case the teacher needed to provide the sites that would be helpful. He/she could tell the students the process used to evaluate the sites without expecting children to do that before they are ready.
A few weeks ago I asked my fourth graders if their reflections in the mirror were real. I was musing aloud during a time when I was reading to them from a Louis Sachar book. A lively debate ensued. The class was fairly evenly divided, and both sides brought forth evidence for thier position.
I was interested in the phenomena of the discussion itself. What does it tell us about them when their awareness of the world and their faculties of judgment make a question about how to distinguish a reflection from the actual object something worth arguing? I wondered.
My principal happened to walk in and joined the fray. He mentioned Descartes, and briefly explained about the problems of evaluating sensory input, leaving them slightly puzzled that adults could actually entertain such questions.
Based on what I see from young students, we’d be doing well if we could teach them to think about source as a matter of point of view. Asking questions like, “Who is saying this?” “How do they know that?” “Why do they believe it?” “What is their purpose for saying it?”
This might be a useful set of questions for any one of us to frequently ask ourselves, no matter how old we are.