When Wikipedia Won't Cut It (Part 1)

Recently on the CollegeDegree.com Library blog, the authors published an entry about research resources which go beyond Wikipedia's "incomplete citations, biased views, and inaccuracies," and direct the user to alternatives which deliver "high quality accuracy."
Most of these are definitely worth taking a look at and keeping an eye on as they grow and change but not all are really very useful.

Citizendium
The first site they recommend is Citizendium, the Citizen's Compendium, an encyclopedia-like site which relies upon ordinary users to write and "experts" to edit its articles. The idea of Citizendium is to go beyond Wikipedia's free-for-all approach to developing an encyclopedic database and enlist folks who are certified to know about what they are writing about.
To join Citizendium the user is required to be vetted at a website called BeenVerified, which helps substantiate you are who you say you are. The site asked various questions about where the prospective member lived and jobs they've had (with information culled from the Web) to substantiate my identity. Of course, this doesn't verify one's expertise. When setting up an account you are asked to check areas of expertise and Citizendium "constables" check up before they are allowed to contribute on their own. Membership seems to be aimed at the academic community and it does seem that Citizendium is trying to make their online encyclopedia a more reliable source of information than Wikipedia currently is.
While it may be true that Citizendium articles are more authoritative, it certainly can't compete with Wikipedia for breadth of coverage. Currently there are some 5,700 articles in Citizendium as compared to 9,000,000 in Wikipedia.
Definitely a site worth knowing about and using.

American FactFinder
This is the English language portal to information from the U.S. Census Bureau. The permutations and combinations of information at the Census Bureau are almost endless and since they are based on data collected by various census polls they can be considered to be as accurate as those compiling the data.
Wikipedia has an external link to this site on its United States Census page but does not have an article specifically on this subject.
For lots of reasons, not the least of which is that this is the online version of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, this is an invaluable site for all students and staff.

The LINGUIST List
This somewhat specialized site which includes an index of academic papers, dissertations, books, etc., on linguistic topics would certainly be fruitful as a resource for linguists and those interested in language in general. The interface is quite playful, one might say almost juvenile, for an academic website. According to its Wikipedia article, the site has been in existence since 1991 and is partially funded by grants from the National Science Foundation.
For the general user this site is too specialized to be added to list of general portals on the Web.

Intute
This is web portal to Web resources which "[s]ubject specialists select and evaluate ... and write high quality descriptions of...." The usefulness of this site is as a reviewer of resources on the Web rather than a compendium of information in general.
It is definitely a site which every student at Redwood should know about and use regularly.

Classic Encyclopedia
The fifth of these resources is an online encyclopedia based on the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. While that edition is considered the classic edition, it's probably not too wise to rely upon it for much modern information. It's an interesting historical artifact and some very well-known authors contributed to it but one needs to be very careful in using it as the definitive source of information.
Probably not very useful for high school students except as a curiosity.

More to follow....

Questia Goes Over Big

This morning I had two great sessions with the combined U.S. History/American Literature classes of Mr. Brown and Mr. Winkler.

The students have begun their U.S. history research papers on a topic of their choosing . Topics can be chosen from American history events which occurred from 1870 to 1990.

Students earlier had been introduced to print library resources and Issues and the Controversies in American History database and had begun to develop topics and thesis statements.

Today we had their second "resource workshop" in which they were introduced to Google Book Search and Google Scholar, as well as two library subscription databases, Questia and CQ Researcher Archive.

The students were shown the basics of the specialized Google search products and how to go beyond them using the "Find in a Library" feature. The limitations of both search engines were pointed out--mainly the issue of access to full text--but the usefulness for research was also explained.

We next showed how CQ Researcher could be used for historical research using its "Issue Tracker" feature which shows documents/articles going back to 1923.

Finally I showed the students a video demo of Questia, a database which we have had for a couple years but which we upgraded our subscription to this year so each student could have an individual account. QuestiaSchool is a database of full-text books and journal, newspaper, and magazine articles. The video showed how to set up a "Project" and then search for and annotate, highlight, bookmark and cite articles and books from the database. Using Questia is like having a library on your laptop and unlike Google's Scholar and Book Search, you are always assured of having access to the texts you finding.

The students were impressed by the power of all of these tools but I'm sure we are going to see the increased use of Questia over the next few weeks.

The Teaching Lab

Last week there was a lively discussion on a school library listserv I belong to about the usefulness of computer labs in libraries as opposed to having computers arranged in a less concentrated way. My response was to describe our set up and how I prefer it to the computer lab approach.

When I first came to Redwood there really wasn't a space to teach information literacy lessons. The Reference Room was broken up into a couple sections each with it's own tables and chairs but with no focal point. and the Main Room didn't really have a space large enough for a class to gather in because book shelves extended throughout the room. Even when we had the occasional staff meeting teachers were sitting between book shelves.

After a few months I began to really see how this wasn't going to work when I had a class in and needed to demonstrate something online to them, not to speak of library orientation sessions and other kinds of presentations.

My first priority was to have a suitable teaching space. By rearranging some of the furniture and moving the librarian's desk out of the center of the room, hanging a screen and figuring out a fairly efficient way to hook up an old LCD projector I was able to turn the Reference Room into a makeshift teaching space which could hold a class of 30+ students. One of the major drawbacks to this setup was that the room is long and narrow (it was the whole library in the early days of the school) and I felt I was not able to hold the attention of kids in the back of the room. My dream at that time was to move the screen to the long side of the room and have a teaching station with a computer and ceiling-mounted projector.

When plans were being made to pass a construction bond I made sure that the teacher station idea had a priority in the modernization project. By moving computers to tables around the periphery of the room (with data- and power-cables coming via ceiling conduits) we made the configuration which we currently have. I also made sure that there was a teaching station (a recycled piece of the old circulation desk) with a hard-wired laptop which could easily be connected to a ceiling-mounted projector. I've been very pleased with the way that the project turned out and can very quickly be online and projecting just what I want the students to see and do.

There are sixteen desktop computers in the room on 48"-wide tables. I specifically chose the wider tables because I don't like to look of computers with no workspace and the wider tables allow students to work side-by-side when necessary. In the middle of the room are four large (8'x4') tables each with at least six chairs. That means that the room can seat 40 in some comfort. The wall shelves still hold the reference collection of around 6,000 titles which didn't have to be sacrificed and which grows each year along with prudent weeding.

The other secret to making the room a success as a teaching space is our 28 laptops which are able to access the wireless network and can be used anywhere in the library. Usually when multiple classes are using the library, we've got some kids on the desktops, some on laptops, and some using the print collection. I really like the combination of all these ways to access information because it forces me and the students to explore all the resources the library has to offer. I like teaching in the Reference Room because I can easily walk to the shelves to show kids where books and other items are located and if I forget something, I'm not running to another location to get it, it's all right there.

My desk is also on the floor of the Reference Room which puts me in the thick of the action all day long.

Skepticism, An Essential Information Literacy Attitude

In a recent column Time magazine's Michael Kinsley discusses his concern over two memoirs which were admitted by their authors to have been faked. One, written by a white woman, was about growing up as a half-Native American gang member in South Central (Los Angeles). The other was the story of a woman who claimed to have been a Holocaust survivor as a child, which features an episode of her having been protected by a pack of wolves for a time. Kinsley refers to these fake memoirs as "autophoniographies."

After the infamous episode a couple years ago in which James Frey's memoir turned out have been padded with tales which were exaggerated or non-existent, I moved his book from the biography section of the library to the fiction section. His wasn't the first and certainly won't be the last of such books.

Kinsley's response to the publication of these books was interesting and has implications for information professionals and those we teach: "[B]ook publishers--unlike newspaper and magazine publishers--do virtually nothing to check or warrant the accuracy of what they print." (I have a feeling Time will be getting a few letters over that comment).

I think we sometimes mislead our students when we imply in any way that they can be secure in using books (print or digital), online subscription databases, or any other source of information without scrutinizing each source with a skeptical eye.

I continually remind my students to "check every source." No source of information is perfect and all have to be taken with some skepticism. As a matter of fact, the entire process of research should be based on a kind of skeptical mindset.

And this doesn't just apply to bogus memoirs. Another recent incident in the news revealed that a study which most likely played some part in the author's winning the 2004 Nobel Prize for Medicine had to be retracted because the author couldn't later verify the results.

The bottom line is not that we throw up our hands and quit looking for information, stop creating knowledge, cease producing results--but that all of us model how to be careful in assessing and evaluating information no matter what the source.

Web Site of the Month (Women's History)

March is Women's History Month and I was alerted to a great website about women's history through a librarian's listserv I subscribe to. It got me thinking that I could do a post each month about a website having to do with some topic being celebrated that month. Coming up we will be celebrating Earth Day in April and Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May.

This month, though, we celebrate the contributions of women in history. Of course, one might ask--why celebrate the larger half of the human race? Basically it's because women's role in history has been traditionally neglected as women were systematically excluded from roles in positions of power through the ages.

So here are this month's sites of the month.

-- American Women's History: A Research Guide
-- American Women Through Time

Both of these sites are maintained by Ken Middleton, a reference librarian at Middle Tennessee State University Library. According to his website, he has a second master's degree, with an emphasis in American women's history, from the same university. American Women's History: A Research Guide was named one of the Best Free Reference Web Sites in 2004 by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association. American Women's History provides citations to print and Internet reference sources, as well as to selected large primary source collections. The guide also provides information about the tools researchers can use to find additional books, articles, dissertations, and primary sources.

The image comes from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920.

iPods Beyond the Music

A recent entry on the Online Education Database site entitled "100 Ways to Use Your iPod" says: "If you think that iPods are used just for listening to music, you obviously haven't been keeping up with the latest technology. The Apple-developed music player now features all kinds of accessories to help you study better, and now other companies are in a rush to get their designs in sync with the iPod. Pre-teens, college kids and even adults are taking advantage of the educational benefits an iPod affords them. From downloadable podcasts to just-for-iPod study guides and applications, learning on the go has never been easier. To find out about the many different ways you can transform your iPod into a learning device, check out our list below."

I'm not sure why the author skipped from pre-teens to college students but obviously, high school students and their teachers should be aware of how MP3 files can be useful to them as well.

The list mentioned includes sites like Raybook! which "combines texts, images, audio and video into a single package you can use on your iPod," iPREPpress, SparkNotes and SparkCharts, and NotePods.

It also gives lists of educational podcast sites, tutorials, iPod applications, and iTunes U (universities such as Stanford, UC, and MIT, which offer downloadable lectures)

In the Bessie Chin Library catalog we have begun to catalog websites which provide podcasts. Just search for the subject "podscasts" to see what we've got so far.

A great portal to all things iPod and educational, this page is well worth taking a look at.

Diversity Week in the library

This week was an interesting one. The library hosted two Diversity Week speakers on Monday and Tuesday and we had a full house for both presenters.

On Monday a group from the teen homeless advocacy organization, Ambassadors of Hope, talked about the problems homeless teens and young adults have in Marin County. The speakers someone who was homeless herself as a teen and determined to do something about it to help others. A young man who had recently been homeless also told of his experiences on the street. They showed a movie narrated by Peter Coyote, a county resident, about the particular problems homeless teens face here. Once they turn eighteen young people can no longer be part of the foster care system and with little or no support many become homeless.

Tuesday's speaker from Seeds of Learning explained the issue of fair trade to students who attended her presentations. She had worked in Central America with coffee growers who tend to be exploited under free trade agreements. The picture at the top of this post is from their website.

Both sets of speakers spoke to all seven periods of classes and as many as two-hundred students heard them each period--so they reached a lot of kids.
From the students comments, questions and answers I could tell there was a wide range of beliefs and responses to both speakers.

At Redwood we are fortunate that the Leadership class and it's teachers are not afraid to delve into controversial issues and consider that diversity refers to more than just ethnic or racial diversity. In Marin it's sometimes easy to forget that there's a great, wide world out there with issues and problems that we can make a difference about.