Tech Integration: Search and research
If you have a hat, place it over your heart now:
I admit I post this image partly for nostalgia over the card catalogs that have gone. Beyond nostalgia, though, take a look: This is a spectacular lot of information to compress into one card, in coded format. Using card catalogs with skill involved practice and decoding. Through the narrow window of the cards we gained precise access to a field of knowledge that was literally enormous:
When we physically walked our fingers through the cards we flipped past related books (if looking through subject cards) or books related only by the accident of being alphabetically adjacent by author or title. Walking on our feet through the library to the book was a literal march through neighboring subjects, then to the other books within the same subject, surrounding our book. Then, through the index of the book, we arrived at the single location of the thought we were seeking.
This journey from the coded card, through physical space, then through pages to the single passage we were seeking was explicitly a research task. And the books themselves seemed to be participating as well: The front matter nailed down the provenance of the book; the bibliography connected use, through another code, to other books.
There were other physically dramatic forms of research. How many movies have shown us an investigator scrolling through the microfilm of old newspapers to find some dramatic fact? Remember this shot, from All the President’s Men, of the reporters Woodward and Bernstein in the Library of Congress, laboring through the records of White House book requests. Look at them in the vast structures of information:
Will we, someday, have dramatic scenes of Google searches? Will we watch two intrepid reporters, staring into a monitor and turning the scroll wheel on a mouse? Or experimenting with regular expressions to data-mine a .csv file? How will we watch people wander through the halls of information on their laptop in a Starbucks?
I outline these changes to point out the challenge in our otherwise easy-access age of research. Research was a physical ritual that learners acted out, and acting out the ritual made the elements of research tangible. Now research is an abstraction. It doesn’t look different from writing, or solving math puzzles, or playing a video game. This makes it hard to enact for students, and hard for them to know when it has happened. We declare that “research” begins and ends at certain points, but we are drawing lines in the water.
Let us also consider one element that has vanished. The physical book, in the physical context of the library, has authority. Someone made the book; someone placed it in the layout of the library; and someone made the layout express a structure for knowledge. All these forces work together to vouch for the information in the book, and place it in a context.
Information that comes across the screen does not have weight, either literally or metaphorically. We cannot see where it belongs. In the past, if I wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to you it presented entirely differently than a passage in a book on a library shelf. But this text you are reading right now arrives with all the same visual authority as text from anywhere else.
Designers talk about affordances: The handle on a hammer tells you to hold it there; the pedals on a bicycle tell you to turn them with your feet. James J. Gibson, who coined the term, said affordances were “action possibilities” in the environment around us. Even prior to human design, there were affordances in the landscape: A cliff affords the action possibility of falling off it and dying; a sharp rock affords the action possibility of cutting something on its edge. Our brains are good at seeking affordances and building knowledge around them. Look at this object and count the actions you can imagine performing on in:
Research has lost its affordances, especially for kinetic young people. We need to restore the action possibilities: research by picking things up, walking, moving things around, and so on. The action possibilities should make the structure of knowledge real, just as stalking information in a library does.
The good news: We still have our libraries, our books, our physical, explorable expressions of the action of research. Technology need not replace those. We need technology to borrow their
K-2: The Spectacle of Searching
The first search terms: Imagine teaching students to examine an object closely and write down all the words relating to it. Minute inspection of a single object yields words and concepts. Now imagine the reverse: words and concepts yield a spectrum of objects:
These are Google Image searches: conifer cone, spiral, dwelling. Let the teacher conduct these searches while the children watch, then discuss: How many different kinds of dwelling are there? What parts of the world do you think we are seeing here?
Then use one of the images to follow a train of curiosity: One of the pictures of a cave dwelling took me to this site, about “10 Fascinating Cave Dwellings Around the World.” Reading aloud and showing the pictures would be a nice interaction, especially if the teacher points out: “This looks like it’s from a site called ‘Touropia.’ It looks like it has a lot of articles about places around the world.”
Why not simply show the article to students? Or do a text search for “dwellings?” The visualization of information is the key. We are teaching that search terms are magical. They make a whole screen full of information happen.
As long as the teacher is focusing on A) the search term; and B) the identity of the source the search term leads to, we can conduct wild and interesting searches of this kind and know it is worth doing.
Share your research process. Let us say you are teaching a unit on owls. Instead of doing all your owl research during your planning time or after school, show your process. You might begin with an online database like Brittanica for Kids. Tell the kids how you walk through the hierarchy of knowledge:
We wind up zeroing in on one sentence: “They later spit up the bones, fur, and feathers that they cannot digest.” Highlight that part, and wonder aloud about it: What happens to those? Now we can move over to “owl pellets” and learn about them.
One virtue of doing this research in front of the kids: You will discover the background knowledge that informs your research, and which the students might not have. Researching alone, you might take your background knowledge for granted.
For now, sticking to a single database or site, especially one with a clear organization, will be more successful than including the results page from the search engine.
Grades 3–5: Research and fluid thinking
At this age, the mind thrives on metaphor and play. As adults, we expect research to narrow our possibilities down to a single stable truth and keep us grounded there. If we are friendlier to a child’s way of thinking, we see research as opening wild possibilities and frog-leaps of imagination.
Broaden thinking through search terms
Quick: How many electrons are in the barium atom? Why, 56. To what part of the spider’s body do the legs join? It’s the cephalothorax. When was Thomas Edison born? February 11, 1847, if you must know.
These are shooting questions — they have one answer. So we have a single, specific question, which we condense into a precise search term, and this gets us a single, specific answer:
We may get many results, but they all point at the same answer. In fact, if they point at many answers, the search term was deficient: “when thomas edison” or “when thomas” do comparatively poor jobs of answering our question.
Teachers lean on these kinds of research exercises because they are so easy to evaluate. A search term, in this context, works or it does not. But what it also does not do is light up a child’s imagination, or make use of a child’s affinity for fluid thinking.
How about this: Where could we go from the search term “plate?”
Let’s begin at the online dictionary, and start refining the search terms:
Now we see one concept that takes us to many “answers”:
Let us call this kind of search a broadening search. Now we can return to the common thread: What do all these kinds of plate have in common? Individual plates are strong and inflexible. Because of how they are joined, the whole thing is flexible. What else is like this?
Imagine broadening searches on terms like float (parade float, root beer float, icebergs, clouds), wave (sound waves, “The Wave” in a stadium, the famous engraving by Hokusai), hub (the hub of a wheel, transportation hub, ethernet hub, a hub of activity), shadow (rain shadow, the shadow of an event). This is research as analogy, which Douglas Hofstadter calls “the core of cognition” in this video (skip to about 14:00 if you want to get straight to the talk).
We expand students’ senses of a word or concept into a broader abstraction. We could already do this through poetry or wordplay or invention (and should), but doing so systematically through the tools of research is a powerful practice. It connects research and discovery in an open-ended way.
Teach citation skills
Simple citation skills are a technical issue and can be taught in a few sessions, with expectations to follow. At this age, students should know how to find the URL (Universal Resource Locator, or link) for any online resource, and a well-formatted citation for any offline resource. Ideally students should be able to present links as source, and not always as bare URLs: http://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
More subtle is determining the source of a piece of information. When an essay quotes a letter, which is the source? When Google helpfully pushes a concrete answer or summary to the top of its search results, what is the source? When an expert answers a question on a site such as Quora, is the expert the source, or is Quora the source?
We ought to engage in these dilemmas as dilemmas, and encourage students to resolve them with reasoning and judgement rather than an appeal to authority.
Provide sources and questions
We should be clear about when students are exercising open-ended creativity in searching (see above) and when they are practicing their aim. Without a clear context for research, students will enact a predictable routine: Type some words into Google, click on the first result (almost always Wikipedia), read in frustration, and perhaps copy-and-paste some arbitrary phrases.
If our aim is target practice in research, the teacher ought to:
- Choose a few readable, reliable resources and share them with students.
- Start a conversation about the chosen resources: For whom are they written? What is their point of view? Are they primary or secondary sources? (Primary sources that work for the young audience are a real treasure. Think of speeches, audio histories, maps, images of artifacts.)
- Write good questions. Not too narrow, not too vague, not leading to a dead end of a simple, factual answer. The real test will come in the next step:
- Encourage students to find more questions in their results. If students’ research turns up more questions, they have asked good questions. If the railway reaches the end of the line and stops there (Thomas Jefferson was born April 17, 1743), there are more interesting questions to explore. We need to encourage a positive feedback loop: Questions engender more questions through research.
Grades 6–8: Research as argument and dialogue
We are not just in a socially “hot” setting when we are dealing with middle school students. We are also dealing with students who often seek out the extremes of human experience, and the extreme positions that could be held over a given subject. The feeblest answer to these conditions is to insist on research as a way of “finding out” a concrete fact. We can do better.
Seek active arguments about research
Let us look closely at this comic from science-oriented web comic xkcd. This has a point to make (and uses the medium well — there is suspense in scrolling, and a shock at the end). Now look at this rebuttal, this article in support, and this article summarizing the debate. There is even a lengthy page on a wiki devoted to giving the deep background on xkcd comics.
Traditional media — newspapers, books, and magazines—had a stamp of authority about them that digital media did not. But how common was it for an article (or, in this case, cartoon) to have such an extensive dialogue around it? It may indeed be easier, as many alarmists say, to spread pure fiction across the internet; but it is also easier to read deeply and find well-sourced argumentation around almost any claim of note.
If information is reliable in the future, it will not be because of the inherent authority of those who produce information, but because of the critical skills of the reader. Hence the urgency about beginning to teach this critical process at this age. Think less of finite, easily-answered information (life expectancy of an eagle, gods of the Egyptian pantheon) and move towards disputable research and controversial issues. Then teach towards the critical judgement needed to make sense of disputes.
Consider diving into Snopes.com, which devotes itself to ferreting out the truth in complex claims. Also direct students to the Talk pages behind Wikipedia pages. The lengths to which Wikipedia editors go to determine the correct stance on factual information is staggering. (Observe, for example, this portion of the discussion on the page on the invention of the telephone.) And remember that many of the authors of articles the students are reading are accessible, via email or Twitter, for instance. The dialogue with sources could be literal.
Look for primary sources everywhere
Here is the audio a 1949 interview with Fountain Hughes, a former slave who was then 101 years old (transcript). This is part of a collection from the Library of Congress’ American Memory site called Voices From the Days of Slavery. In the recording, skip to 8:35 to hear this passage:
We had no home, you know. We was just turned out like a lot of cattle. You know how they turn cattle out in a pasture? Well after freedom, you know, colored people didn’t have nothing. Colored people didn’t have no beds when they was slaves. We always slept on the floor, pallet here, and a pallet there. Just like, uh, lot of, uh, wild people, we didn’t, we didn’t know nothing. Didn’t allow you to look at no book. And then there was some free born colored people, why they had a little education, but there was very few of them, where we was.
Later he speaks about his father dying, about being hired out by his mother for a dollar a month, about sleeping in barns and the backs of cars. To hear this spoken in the voice of a slave can be a profound experience, even if only for a moment. How powerful it could be for a young adolescent to be invited to live inside the mind of a person from an experience so different than their own. In a way, we are transferring authority from the publisher of secondary materials to the individual experience.
Consider this collection of interviews with American citizens the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Consider this collection on the Mexican-American immigrant experience. Even consider this song from 200 BC, probably the oldest complete musical composition still intact. None of these are prepared with “facts” for students to write down. In fact the feeling of these pieces may be more important than the facts. But this is research, of the sort that was immeasurably harder before the technology of the internet.
Develop reusable research routines
There is nothing surprising in 10-year-olds reading non-fiction in haphazard ways. By middle school, however, students should be able to break apart a subject into questions of a regular type. For example, when students read a biography, they should try to get a general portrait of the time and place the subject was raised in; they should know what their subject’s major accomplishment was; what struggles the subject overcame; his or her legacy, and so forth.
This is only tangentially a tech issue. But there are tools that can ease the process. Students can create Google Forms to “interview” themselves on a subject with the boilerplate questions they devised. Teachers can hand out research templates and students can adapt them. The larger goal is for students to develop awareness of research as the process by which they gain information; they do not simply read a single article and generically “learn.”
Grades 9–12: Student as the research engine
Conduct primary research
The internet is nearly boundless with raw data: census information, satellite imagery, primary documents, data from physical geography (streamflow, wind speeds, temperatures). Much of it is not immediately friendly for “research” as we have been teaching it. Loading life-expectancy data into a spreadsheet is hard labor compared to reading an encyclopedia entry or editorial.
The labor is worth it if we think of students in future roles: Running a business and looking for a pattern in the accounting; trying to solve a social-engineering problem with available data; even trying to make decisions about their own financial or bodily health.
Fortunately, programmers love creating interfaces for data and making them available to the world. Consider Google NGrams, which uses is vast database of scanned texts to show the frequency of given words in English texts. We can see the decline of “prudence” and the rise of “synergy.” Consider wading into the masses of data on global health from the World Health Organization. For pure lunatic overkill, you can’t beat slicing through the baseball data at Retrosheet, with its dedication to capturing data on every play of every game in professional baseball history.
Research the research
How do falsehoods originate? How do biases and inaccuracies morph and grow over time, and what is their life cycle? We could study such issues without technology, but our view would be antiquated. At the time of writing, the world is adjusting to the alarming development of computational propaganda—online arguments being provoked by algorithms masquerading as human beings, or entire “news” websites generating by scraping other sites and mashing up the results.
We should assume that the issue of machine-generated information will increase rather than fade out. Even if not, the flow of information and misinformation, practically in real time, is both fascinating and disturbing. We should arm students with the ability to trace potentially dodgy research to its origins, and portray the actors involved.
Assess the depth and breadth of their own research
Now is the age when students can set their own research targets, evaluate whether those targets are extensive enough, and track their own progress. Say we ask students to research an historical event. They should ask:
- What are the critical points to research?
- Do these points cover the subject extensively enough?
- Have I acquired enough information to understand each point?
- Is the information reliable?
By the end of high school, students should be able to vouch for their process and its outcomes, and do so on the basis of skilled self-evaluation.