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Digital Research
by Elizabeth Helfant

Last week I spent a lot of time in the library. We are kicking off several research projects in some of our electives. The librarian and I frequently work together to support research projects. The ability to ask good questions, to search and identify the resources needed to accurately answer the question, and  to keep track of the information that is found are at the heart of the research process. Research itself hasn’t really changed- its still about answering questions by finding reliable, current information. While research is essentially unchanged, the information landscape has changed dramatically and new tools are now available to make the process easier.

We use many Web 2.0 tools to help students with the research process. Some tools are selected to make the research process more transparent and to allow us to give feedback during the process. Some are used to help students keep track of sources. I’ve listed them and the way we use them below. I’ve tried to give a brief description. It may seem like a lot of tools but we tend to believe that one size doesn’t fit all and the overarching skills supersede the tool itself.

Brainstorming/Concept Maps

We use mind maps or concept maps to refine the topic we are studying and then again to organize the research notes students take. Our favorite tools are:

Bubbl.us – This is simple and easy to use for quick brainstorming. It can be shared for groups of students to use and it can be embedded in their research notebook or in an assessment portfolio. We tend to use this to have students brainstorm their topic as a pre-research activity.

Mindmeister – Mindmeister is a robust mapping tool but does not have the most intuitive interface. It does have collaborative and offline –editing capability.

xMind and FreeMind – Both of these have downloadable clients and live on the computer. They can be exported in a variety of formats. I prefer xMInd. It allows adding images, linking to websites, and adding files. When we want a more robust tool, typically for individual research projects, we use one of these. Students refine their topic and add resources to the mind map. Its not a technology issue but it bears mentioning – scaffolding a project results in a beneficial learning process and a high quality product. Failure to provide time for learning to occur and to scaffold in a manner that allows students to skip steps, procrastinate, or cut corners results in minimal learning and maximum frustration for teacher and student. With our younger researchers, the use of a mind map allows us to better scaffold the research process for them with a process (mind-mapping) they are already familiar with. If they share their maps with us from the beginning, we can watch the process as it unfolds and provide feedback to correct students before they go down a bad path.

Webspiration -Webspiration is simply a browser based version of Inspiration. It can also be shared and mindmaps can be published as webpages. Webspiration, like Inspiration, allows you to convert mindmap to outline and publish to google docs or download to word. If the research project requires students to produce an outline, this is our tool of preference. Students brainstorm in concept map format, convert to an outline, send to google docs, and invite the teacher and librarian to share the doc and in so doing, to share the research process as they fill in the outline as they research.

We spend lots of time talking with students about finding information when we undertake a research project. We encourage them to use databases, to read Wikipedia for an overview and to occasionally check the history and think about what that tells them, and to search with other search engines or with more specific tools within google. We also play search games with them to teach them how to refine a search. It is fun to have a competition with the winner being the one who can return the fewest results. Below are some suggestions to use with searches. Have students search with three different search tools and then rank the tools in terms of which supplied the best results using a google form or have them evaluate the three searches on their learning blog if they have one. (We are starting to have some of our students keep a blog that is more of a reflective, metacognition space that can be used across disciplines.) Below are some of our staples.

Google Wonder Wheel and Google Timeline – Under the google search field, you will find a link to More Options. Clicking on this gives you a list of options two of which are timeline and wonderwheel. Choose a topic, like Civil Rights Movement and explore these. One gives you a categorized concept map for the term and the other gives you a timeline. They give you different ways of looking at the search and interacting with the information

Google Scholar, Google Books and Google News – Other google options allow you to specify the type of resource you want to search. Each are worth exploring when asking students to do a research paper. If the event is current, google news advanced search lets students specify the country they want to see the news from. This is a great way to get perspectives on international events. If its literary research, be aware that google books allows students to search for keywords and returns all instances of the word as potential quotes.

Moving out of the google world, the following are also interesting to use.

Cuil was created by those who brought us google and claims to be better and to search more pages. It uses an algorithm that uses relevancy over popularity. When doing academic searches, we are finding it to be quite good at organizing information and displaying information that is more useful. It organizes information with a tabbed browser approach and offers different category, map, and timeline views along the right side. It also has a connection with facebook that I have not yet explored.

Bing.com It is worth mentioning this one but I don’t like it as much as google or Cuil. For a topic for which information is difficult to find, its worth seeing what this turns up.

Kartoo is a visual search engine that organizes the information into categories. Its not a bad tool to use to help brainstorm some topics. A search of tuberculosis displays a map with categories of infection, symptoms, prevention, treatment, and research. The concept map it generates can help define research strategies.

Clusty organizes information in clusters and provides a neat preview option with each result.

There are also interesting options for specialized types of searches.

It’s interesting to search for data. Try typing in two countries and see the numerical comparisons that a WolframAlpha search produces. Beyond searching, this tool has the capability of changing math homework. Type in  4x^4+2x^2/(2x-2) and look at the solutions you get to a potential homework problem.

For video Truveo and Binkx.

While both sites are excellent video search engines, I’m partial to truveo because of the way you can isolate videos based on the channel of origination. You have an option to select only videos from the UN or from CNN or from YouTube.

We do what we can to emphasize databases as a source for research. Our librarians organized our databases into something of a flowchart to help students identify the type of information best located in each database.

Bookmarking and Determining Reliability of Sources

When doing online research students need to save sites they plan to use and they need to make sure that sites they use are reliable. We ask them to use social bookmark sites and to put their evaluation of the site in the description field as well as to use a project specific tag. Since the bookmarks are public, the teacher, the librarian, and I can subscribe to the tags and we make sure that students are judging sites properly.

Delicious is simple and easy. We required all our students to have a delicious account two years ago. At the point, Diigo did not have as much traction and lacked some of the features it now has. Diigo has become our tool of preference. It’s ability to have class groups and the added annotation capability tip the scales in its favor. Check out the diigo comments that have been left on this New Yorker article about hiring good teachers.

It should also be noted that we take time to teach students how to search for sites using the network features of delicious.

Once a topic has been determined, sources identified and evaluated, students need to take notes. This part of the research process can be made transparent so teachers can give feedback during the process. There are a number of tools available for the note taking process.

Taking Notes from the Web

When students are engaged in research, anything teachers can do to scaffold the assignment to minimize the opportunity to copy and paste directly from the source is key. Encouraging students to take notes in a medium that allows the teacher to view the note taking process and to provide feedback on the quality of information or to offer suggestions on what other sources might be consulted can facilitate deeper research. We have had the most success with Zoho notebook and with shared OneNote Notebooks. Both tools have a firefox plugin that allows the user to highlight text or images when doing internet research, to right click and save the information directly into the notebooks. The information goes into the notebooks and also takes a link to the page containing the information. This helps students when they need to construct their bibliography. We are finding that if we have students share their research with the teacher and the librarian so they can follow along in the process making sure there is minimal procrastination and sources and information are indeed appropriate, we don’t have to use this process with most students. We can differentiate the research process asking only those still struggling with research to share notebooks with us. Its about formative assessment and feedback at that point and not about grades.

When we don’t require research notebooks, we often require some of the research material to be annotated electronically and submitted to the teacher and librarian. This process is also quite popular for group research projects as annotations can be shared among the entire group. The tools below let students annotate, attach sticky notes, and share information with each other.  Again,  consider the opportunities you now have to provide input/feedback on the research process as it is happening. We use some of these tools to leave comments on the sites students have indicated they are using or that they have already annotated.

Diigo is certainly the most powerful, particularly in group projects. A diigo group can be created and students can bookmark all the information they find to the group. They can all participate in highlighting and adding comments to the articles they think will be useful. In the diigo group, they can view just the annotations and comments, a feature that can be helpful in getting them to take the important notes and assimilate them into their own product.

Awesome Highlighter and SharedCopy are simplier and less powerful tools. They allow students to highlight a document and submit a link that will allow others to see the annotations. When the research is for a smaller and less complex project, these are sometimes faster to use. We also use these to annotate and provide feedback on student blogs so that we can grade electronically and share our feedback with just the student.

Obviously, good research requires thorough citation. There are many tools available to help students create citations and bibliographies. The three we use most often are NoodleBib Express, EasyBib and Ottobib. NoodleBib teaches students to think through the type of resources that are being used. IT also helps students organize information by project.  Often overlooked are the citation/bibliography features within Word 2007. When students are writing their research papers in Word or when the research is coming primarily from text or print media, we point students to the Reference tab in Word and have them add their sources and use this to enter citations in the Word document.

Many of our research project culminate in something other than a paper however and in that case, the electronic citation tools are more helpful.

Students need to learn to find information on their own but there are also times when teachers should provide some suggested sources for students as well. If the topic is difficult and you want to expedite the process, if you want to suggest multimedia resources so they learn that information doesn’t just come from print, if you want to ensure that they use only certain cites, there are tools that you can use to control their searching and to deliver pre-screened resources to students.

PageFlakes or Netvibes , tools that serve as customized start pages can be created around any topic. Teacher and librarian can format these pages to pull RSS feeds from a variety of sources. These pages can be set up to engage students in the use of Multimedia to learn about a topic. Most recently a link to a netvibes site on Haiti came through my twitter feed. It is a nice example of what can be done.

The us of a customized Google Search Engine can help efficiently steer students to reliable sources. When we ask students to do simple research on a current events topic, we frequently create a customized search engine. We load the search engine with perhaps a dozen sites that will return reliable information. For example, in science we might create a search engine that will use only Scientific American, the New York Times Science section, National geographic, PBS, BBC, etc. Studnets search is then restricted to these sources. It ensures reliable information, information at a certain ability level, and makes the search process more efficient and timely for students.

Information can be provides for students by creating WikiGuides or PathFinders, wikipages populated with good sources about a specific topic. Our library has several wikiguides on the homepage. Joyce Valenza has made many good pathfinders and they are available on the Springfield Township library page. We recently used this one on global issues.

We have recently begun using zotero for longer research projects. The movie found on zotero’s page does a nice job explaining the tool. Suffice it to say, it has more powerful features and is more complicated to use. However, for juniors and seniors who will potentially move to college and find themselves using RefWorks, Zotero might be a nice transition.

While there is a myriad of tools that you can select to facilitate research and make the process transparent, it is all for naught if you don’t engae as the assessor and provide feedback to students.  While power in the tools above is certainly comprised of their ability to help students find, evaluate, organize, and cite sources for their projects, the real power is in the ability of these tools to make the research process a learning partnership between students and teacher and librarian.

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.