findingDulcinea

Educators Will Create the Successor to Textbooks

This summer, The New York Times featured yet another article on how to replace textbooks. Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, estimated that the U.S. education system spends $8-$15 billion per year on text books. One study claims that only 11% of this expenditure actually goes to creating content. Of course, printing, distributing and disposing of textbooks also comes at an enormous environmental cost.

The primary alternatives discussed in the NYT article are open-sourced, digital textbooks that can be customized by an educator.

But while the successors to textbooks surely will be digital, they won't be a textbook at all:

• They won't be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year's Texas controversy;
• "chapters" won't reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of educators; 
• in subjective areas, they won't require students to memorize particular "facts" and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and
• they won't impose a "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of passionate educators who, in the words of John Carver, superintendent of Van Meter (Iowa) Schools, collectively decide that no one should have "ownership" over what is taught in schools.

There are a number of approaches that could render a product that meets the above objectives. However:

• A Wiki that is subject to the whims of a narrow band of editors with a lot of time to devote to winning ideological battles would preclude the involvement of the contributors with the most to offer;
• a "silo" approach to publishing, where educators post work only on their own school sites, will inhibit the collaboration necessary to develop depth, breadth and scale quickly; and
• there must be some central administration to continually enhance the solution in response to educator feedback.

At the recent Techonomy Conference, Bill Gates predicted that in five years, the best college education will come from the Web. But in many subjects, innovative educators are already using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. Thousands of teachers and librarians around the world are finding, and sharing with their students, outstanding Web resources - including primary sources, expert analysis and countervailing viewpoints - that dwarf the information available in any textbook. These teachers are also creating lesson plans and assignments that test students' critical thinking and relevant communication skills, rather than prepare them to fill in bubbles on a standardized test. And they teach students how to effectively use the Web resources they'll use the rest of their life, and not a textbook that will soon join a landfill.

Many of these educators post their assignments on the Web; often on a school Web site, sometimes on a blog or other platform. This spring, when my daughter and her friends became concerned one of their  teachers wasn't adequately preparing them for an Advanced Placement Exam, they sought out materials on the Web, and eventually settled on a teacher in Northern Virginia as having the best exam prep materials. Everyone in my daughter's group passed the exam, while several of their classmates did not. I recently learned about a remarkable site for teachers and students of English created by Sandra Effinger; I foresee AP test takers from all over the country accessing her resources in coming years; here is a similar site for high school psychology.

The number of sites like the ones offered by these two educators will grow exponentially in coming years. What is needed is a central repository that collects many of them, so that teachers can access assignments created by other teachers, and learn from, and build on them. And if that repository was also one that made it easy for teachers to find great resources in the first place, and provided a free mechanism for sharing the resources and assignments with their students and colleagues, well, all the better. And if it promised a whole host of new features in the near future? It could very well become the successor to textbooks.

And that is what our free product, findingEducation, offers. It's in Alpha stage, and we can do a lot to make it better, but in its current form, the potential for it is clear. Its back-end is powered by SweetSearch and the content of findingDulcinea to help educators easily find the best online resources about any subject. Its My Library enables teachers to save the links they find to a bookmarking tool, and then share them with students on their assignment page. It combines assignment management and quality resource discovery into a “digital classroom.” Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website, with their own look and feel.

The ultimate value in findingEducation comes when it becomes heavily used by outstanding educators. For example, once hundreds, or thousands, of U.S. History teachers create assignments for, and provide links to materials about, the U.S Civil War, then a new teacher entering the fray can create a new assignment that synthesizes the best of the predecessor works. Teachers can identify other teachers who consistently create outstanding assignments, and use them as a model for their own.

What will it take for findingEducation to create a critical mass that will turn it into a "must use" tool? Sponsorship by a large education entity or organization that will encourage use by a substantial number of members. We can even create a separate file for these organizations to co-brand the offering and make it easy for members of the organization to find each other's work. Organizations such as AASA, NSSSA, NCSS, and ALA should have a keen interest in discussing this possibility with us, as should state and regional education departments.

We have a number of modules and additional features that can be introduced into findingEducation once it develops a meaningful user base.

For more information on findingEducation:

See a sample page: http://markskillman.findingeducation.com/

Take our site tour.

See our help section for our FAQ and other tips for using findingEducation.

For more information or to contact us with inquiries, comments or feedback, e-mail [email protected] or write me directly at [email protected]

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.

Question Number Two: Why Did They Write This?

Once you know who published the Web site and wrote the content, you have to ask, "Why?"

When we create our Web Guides, we usually provide research strategies that caution you to be wary of sites that aren't what they seem. We've come across dozens of Web sites that appear to offer valid information but in fact were created for another purpose. 

Some of these we explained in a feature called "Suspicious Sites," that is an ideal tool for learning how to decipher "why" a site was created. 

Many Web sites provide so-called information about a health topic, but are published by lawyers looking for medical malpractice clients. 

We've uncovered Web sites that appear on the surface to provide good information about 

• mortgages, 
• financial advice, 
• insurance, 
• plastic surgery options and 
• drug treatment centers.

But in each case, their only purpose was to collect your personal information so they could sell it to companies or individuals offering those services. 

In a more common example, we recently wrote about a famous woman whose achievements were legitimately disputed. The Maryland Women's Hall of Fame site offered a biography about her but didn't mention the controversy. The stated purpose of the site was to honor women who have made lasting contributions, and apparently it felt that its mission would be compromised if it diluted her contribution by noting the controversy. Yet if you handed in a paper on this woman and did not note the controversy, the omission would probably reduce your grade.

In all these cases, publishing accurate, balanced information was not the primary purpose of the Web site.

Of course, you should use a full list of criteria when evaluating a Web site. But as soon as a Web site loads on your computer, ask yourself "who," and then "why"?

Then comes when.

Question Number Three: When Did They Write This?

Thank you for reading,

Mark E. Moran

CEO

Finding The Real Source of Your Source

There is so much posting and reposting of content online these days, that it can sometimes be difficult to discover the true original source of a story.  Once a story becomes popular on the Web, thousands of copy cat stories crop up everywhere, often quoting or summarizing the original and not as often giving proper credit. The reason many stories online get sensationalized is because people just copy and recopy information from one source to another, without bothering to verify the source.

While using those less-than-reliable sources can be an easy way to read information, it can sometimes mean that the info you are getting (especially with a developing story) is dramatized or just incorrect. When doing any kind of research, you want to get as close to a primary source as possible.

So how can you find the true source of your information in a world overrun with automatic news aggregators? You have to use a little detective work.

First, evaluate the credibility of the source you've been sent.  Is it a trustworthy news source or publication, or is it a site filled with adwords and random content scraped from the web?  For tips, see our "How to evaluate web sites" from our On This Day challenge materials.

If you find that the source you're reading from doesn't look totally credible, look through the content of the story  and see if you can spot any attribution or links to an original piece. 

If that isn't available, try going to a news source you already trust and searching for some of your subject keywords to see if you can find a more reliable version of the story.

OR

If you think the story you read might be a copy from a legitimate source, try searching for an exact phrase from the story in a search engine by using quote marks.

If the news is about a person or organization, see if you can find their own web site for commentary or updates.

Video clips from YouTube or other video hosting sites can be tricky to locate the original source of.  Look for any kind of watermark or logo within the video itself to determine the original source. If you know what program the video came from, search on that network's site to see if it has been made available for the public. Unauthorized copies of videos are often removed after a short time, so using an unauthorized video clip in research may mean that you won't be able to refer to it later, it is best to find the original source if possible.

If what you are looking for is an older source, try looking in newspaper archives or library archives, you'll be surprised how much information is available to those who look a little deeper. 

And of course, primary source material is always your best bet, for places to go to find primary sources, read our blog post from a few weeks ago, "Discovering Primary Source Material."

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Beyond Jackie & Rosa: Helping Students Find Unfamiliar People to Write About for Black History Month

Recently, my daughter’s Global Studies Class was asked to write a biography about a famous woman from Asia, Africa or South America. The teacher said that in the prior school year, 90 percent of the students chose Mother Teresa. The teacher promised bonus points for anyone who chose an unfamiliar woman. 

Together we reviewed our “Happy Birthday” feature and found 11 women from these three continents. A week later, Maggie claimed her bonus points, and indeed knocked the teacher’s socks off, by turning in a well-sourced paper on  Wangari Muta Maathai, the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The experience gave rise to SweetSearch Biographies.  

Maggie's assignment reminded me that students are often asked to write a biography about a significant person from a particular profession, gender or race/national origin. We knew we had hundreds of biographical profiles in our Happy Birthday, On This Day and features sections, and that to make them easily accessible, we had to put them all in one place and allow students to sort them.

SweetSearch Biographies launched last week, and offers well-sourced profiles, or the SweetSearch results page, for more than 1,000 significant people, and can be filtered by profession, gender and race/national origin. One elated school librarian cheered the timing, at the beginning of Black History Month, as she was "a little weary of Jackie and Rosa who are of course important but sometimes you need to stretch a bit to someone unfamiliar." Given the 80+ profiles of African-Americans, students should be able to knock their teachers’ socks off by finding someone unfamiliar. 

(Note: One state's student assessment division recently asked to license our biographies for the state's elementary school ELA exams. They gushed that our bios were so well written - organized, concise and full of information. So not only do our biographies served as examples of good Web research and writing, but reading them also prepares students for assessment exams!)

(We are updating all of the content from findingDulcinea and republishing it on SweetSearch2Day, its eventual successor).

Here are links to five people whose life stories amazed me when I first read about them on our Website:
 

Elizabeth Blackwell

Thor Heyerdahl

Miriam Makeba

Rita Moreno

Witold Pilecki

 

Thank you for reading,

Mark Moran

Forget the Textbook; Will the iPad and Kindle DX Help Lighten Students' Backpacks?

With the recent unveiling of Apple's iPad, which looks like an oversized iPhone, some publications have begun to speculate that the new touch screen, keyboard-free netbook will also double as a textbook.

The reason for the speculation is that the iPad will feature an iBookstore along with its iBooks application, which will allow users to download and then read books on their device. If that sounds like something you've already heard of, you're right. The new app could make the iPad a competitor to Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader.

And bringing a digital device into the classroom is nothing new, either. Last year, Amazon began attempts to integrate the Kindle DX, a larger version of the original Kindle, into the classroom. It gave away a couple hundred of the electronic readers to college students, with mixed results.

According to an article by Jessica Mintz of the Associated Press, while students liked that the Kindle DX allowed them to access a number of textbooks in one device, some students missed the old-fashioned method of notetaking and dog earing books. Professors found it hard to direct students to the proper page numbers in textbooks because the Kindle DX doesn't number pages, and students can choose the size of the text on each page, potentially creating a different number of pages.

Will Apple's iPad be able to overcome some of the Kindle DX's hurdles in gaining wider use in schools? And will readers prefer the iPad screen for reading compared with the Kindle's screen, which was designed to be easy on the eyes? That remains to be seen. For now, some of the major publishers have already started working on developing iPad applications for study help, but no official word on the actual texts being converted for the iBookstore. 

With the cost of the iPad and the Kindle DX both inching toward $500, even if the texts are cheaper than the hard copies, it is hard to say whether students and parents will want to invest in the products. Many students already have MP3 players and schools have invested heavily in netbooks and computers. Is the technology compelling enough for them to spend more money to get the devices?

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Sweet Sites | Magazines, Journal Articles, Books and More

Nothing beats a library, but know before you go using the online catalog WorldCat.

Thanks to my last Sweet Sites entry, "Global Resources for Searching Local News," you should now have just about all the newspaper access that you’ll ever need. Here are three more sites that can help temporarily quench your thirst for reading material.

Search for magazine articles that are available for free online via MagPortal. A page on the site lists the magazines available and what articles have been indexed.

If you’ve just got to keep up with the latest scientific discoveries, you’ll find every research paper published in a NIH-funded journal at PubMed Central.

Why wait to go the library to see if they have what you want on the shelf? Visit WorldCat and get information about books, CDs, videos, news articles and digital collections held by more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

You can get this blog entry delivered to your e-mail inbox every Monday with our Sweet Sites newsletter. Sign up for it here!

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Writer? Fact Check, Please

Here at findingDulcinea, we have a lot on our plate: news analysis, how-to guides, sassy features and one sweet new search engine. But among our offerings, there is one common flavor: the quest for accuracy, as the bookish etymology of our domain name suggests.

In 2007, we ran a news story entitled “Connectivity and Productivity: The Web Giveth, the Web Taketh Away.”  The gist of the piece was about the link between access to information and proclivities to procrastination, yet the same phrase could be applied to the search for online veracity.

The rise of new media has given ground to fresh news voices and the five-minute news cycle. Inherent in the drive to publish constantly new content, however, is a tendency to fall out of the habit of fact checking.

Both The New York Times and The Huffington Post have been called out this week for featuring a blog and a video, respectively, as serious content, while in actuality they were spoofs. Retractions have been issued and the employee at the Baltimore NBC affiliate behind the doctored video has been fired.

Instances like these stress the importance of finding credible Web sites—and using findingDulcinea or SweetSearch, two Web sites that do this for you.

Anne Szustek
Senior Writer

Read our Beyond the Headlines story on this topic, "New-Media Blunders Stress Need for Fact-Checking."