Information Literacy and Online Inquiry

Information Literacy and Online Inquiry


This week’s resources really empowered me to become a better online inquirer. Coiro, (2005) and Hartman, (2010) explained how daunting it is for young students to navigate their ways online, and some adults are even in the same shoes. This week’s resources further reinforced the notion that students should be purposely thought how to search for the information they want online. I find some of the methods outlined by Dr. Hartman very tasking and time consuming. Trying to determine the authenticity of a web site by looking at web address and making predictions as to where next the website will take you could not be said to be realistic. On the other hand knowing the conventions about domain names can help students to determine which websites are authentic. November, (2008) and Eagleton & Dobler (2007) give some hints on how to identify and distinguish between a personal and institutional websites which I found very helpful.



Effective Ways to Locate Websites:

I found it very useful using some of the strategies suggested by November, (2008). The strategies are very straight forward, and reduced the number of search results returned significantly. Many potential online researchers are turned off by the share numbers of pages they have to go through many of them sometimes unrelated and misleading. To locate the websites that I bookmarked, I followed the process described by November, (2007) and typed key words into AltaVista and Google to locate information in my subject area that I mentioned in my week 2 Unit Plan. While on the AltaVista webpage, I typed in host: educationcanada.com + mechanical system + students activities" Less than 2 seconds I hit 162,000 results! I also typed in host: educationcanada.com + mechanical system + work done" In about one second, I got 210,000 results! These search words reduced automatically reduced variables that the search engine will look for, it only returned sites that fit into my criteria. Here are some of the URLs that I came up with:

My Delicious account URL:

http://www.delicious.com/yemiadegbite

Deciding Which Sites to Visit:

Deciding which site to visit is made easier by following suggestions made by November, (2008) and Eagleton, & Dobler, (2007). Decision about which sites to visit is not easy even for some tech savvy researchers, but the task could be made easier by looking at the domain names, looking at the name extensions, by briefly scanning through the contents, looking at the authors’ information, how regularly the sites are updated, and the use of easywhois web site in order to get more information about the history of the website, (www.easywhois.com), and by searching the website archive using http://www.archive.org/.


My Web Searching Experiences

Using search engine with precise search strings and getting desired results this week really boost my confidence in online inquiry. My students will benefit immensely from this experience because I am better prepared now to teach them workable techniques to search for the right information online without the agony of having to deal with many unwanted websites and misleading information. This week’s experts offered practical and workable suggestions that reduced search engine results to a manageable size. Different search engines produce different results. Eagleton, and Dobler, (2007) highlighted four different search engines such as ones for younger kids, older students, Meta-search engines as well as Portals and directories. All these engines will return different results. November, (2007), declared that knowing which search engine to use is also critical in his explanation, it will be wrong to go to grocery store if you are shopping for electronics.


Social Bookmarking tool for Locating Information

I found my “Delicious” bookmarking site experience pleasant; I have bookmarked some of the relevant sites I visited during this exercise for future use. I created virtual index for future reference and tagged it on delicious website. The most effective way I discovered is to give each website you bookmarked a unique name tag before you save it for easy access next time. You can make your tags private or public. Marking it private will make it inaccessible to other people. You can put all your tag in a bundle by creating a tag bundle, which is a good way to organize your tags. You can do a lot of things on your setting page such as adding users to your network, import, export upload and sharing etc. You can add or remove people from your network anytime. Bookmarking is a very efficient and convenient way to keep track of your digital journey and build a sort of digital library.



References

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Coiro, J. (2005, October). Making sense of online text. Educational Leadership, 63(2), 30–35.

Laureate Education, Inc. 2010 (Producer). Teaching Online Literacy Skills. (DVD). Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom. Baltimore, MD: Author.

November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.