Thursday, March 11, 2010

Teaching humans how to learn !?!

So, I've been griping, about this topic for a while.

As part of my "fun" I looked at "The Big 6", and included this as one part of my application:
"
It is amusing and confusing to see what I consider to be a perfectly natural (untrained) process labeled, copyrighted and marketed with apparent success. When researching for and writing my April 2007 post “How does one cite a blog post in APA style?” I used the same natural mental processes I recall my school mates and I used in our teens (1981-1986), and that I see my unschooled children using today. My own teen years were before Eisenberg & Berkowitz began touting this “model and curriculum” (copyrighted variously 1987 (Eisenberg, 2004) and 1988 (Eisenberg & Berkowitz, 1997)).

Details of the Big 6 steps to problem solving / information literacy are spelled out when hovering over the numbers in the header of the website http://big6.com/. For the fun of it, see how my process could be hung on the hangers of “the Big 6”:

  1. Task Definition
    1. I wanted to cite blog posts appropriately for my assignments; (define task)
    2. I needed to find instructions, suggestions or examples on how to do so. (identify information needed)
  2. Information seeking strategies
    1. I could look in the official APA guide; ask teachers or colleagues; search with Google (to start).(Determine all possible sources)
    2. I would search those sources in that order. (Select the best)
  3. Location and Access
    1. I know the Dewey Decimal number for citation guides; talk to teachers in class and colleagues at work and Google is in my browser window. (Locate sources)
    2. APA Guide had principles I could use but no specific example, teachers and colleagues refer to the guide, but Google produced results. (Find information within sources)
  4. Use of information
    1. I read and evaluated a variety of pages from the Google results. (Engage)
    2. I kept pages with likely examples open in tabs. (Extract relevant information)
  5. Synthesis
    1. I tagged (with delicious) the pages that had examples even though they didn’t seem right enough to me, and quoted those examples … (Organise information from multiple sources)
    2. In a contemplative blog post of my own in which I compared the examples against the APA referencing style principles.(Present the information)
  6. Evaluation
    1. Finding and extracting information was very fast, my comparison and making decision took a bit longer. Writing took the longest. My natural thinking processes worked. (Judge the process)
    2. I am satisfied with my conclusion and no teachers have quibbled with the way I reference blogs. My writing was not the most fluent, but it was for me as a student, not an audience. Had I been an educator or librarian I would have written more briefly and obtained or hedged against an institutional decision. Even so, at first around 80-90 people a day, and more recently 30-40 people a day visit that blog post from Google or other searches on the topic (statistics obtained from MyBlogLog) so I appear to have created new knowledge. Unfortunately although I asked for comments, few people leave any so I could not tell whether people agreed with my conclusion or not. However I recently discovered that my conclusion matches a style later advised by Judi DeLisle (2007) of Valencia Community College who also cites my post "How does one cite a blog post comment in APA style?”. MyBlogLog also revealed that people arrived at my blog wanting to know how to cite YouTube and Flickr, so I went on to research those problems too. (Judge the product)
"

Sigh. How ever did anyone manage to solve problems before 1987?

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