David Weinberger's Blog, page 102

[2b2k] [berkman] Alison Head on how students seek information

Alison Head, who is at the Berkman Center and the Library Information Lab this year, but who is normally based at U of Washington's Info School, is giving a talk called "Modeling the Information-Seeking Process of College Students." (I did a podcast interview with her a couple of months ago.)

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people's ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Project Information Literacy is a research project that reaches across institutions. They've (Michael Eisenberg co-leads the project) surveyed 11,000 students on 41 US campuses to find out how do students find and use information. They use voluntary samples, not random samples. But, Alison says, the project doesn't claim to be able to generalize to all students; they look at the relationships among different kinds of schools and overall trends. They make special efforts to include community colleges, which are often under-represented in studies of colleges.

The project wanted to know what's going through students' heads as they do research. What's it like to be a student in the digital age? "How do students define the research process, how do they conceptualize it" throughout everyday school life, including non-course-related research (e.g., what to buy).

Four takeaways from all five studies:

1. "Students say research is more difficult for them than ever before." This is true both for course-related and everyday life research. Teachers and librarians denied this finding when it came out. But students describe the process using terms of stress (fear,angst, tired, etc.) Everyday-life research also had a lot of risk associated with it, e.g., when researching medical problems.

Their research led the project to come up with a preliminary model based on what students told them about the difficulties of doing research that says in the beginning part of research, students try to define four contexts: big picture, info-gathering, language, situational. These provide meaning and interpretation.

a. Big picture. In a focus group, a student said s/he went to international relations class and there was an assignment on how Socrates would be relevant to a problem today. Alison looked at the syllabus and wondered, "Was this covered?" Getting the big picture enables students to get their arms around a topic.

b. Info gathering. "We give students access to 80 databases at our small library, and they really want access to one," says Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus.

c. Language. This is why most students go to librarians. They need the vocabulary.

d. Situational. The expectations: how long should the paper be, how do I get an A, etc.? In everyday life, the situational question might be: how far do I go with an answer? When do I know enough?

Students surveyed said that for course related research they almost always need the big picture, often need info-gathering, sometimes need language, and sometimes need situational. Students were 1.5x more likely to go to a librarian for language context. For everyday-life, big picture is often a need, and the others are needed only sometimes. Many students find everyday-life research is harder because it's open-ended, harder to know when you're done, and harder to know when you're right. Course-related research ends with a grade.

2. "Students turn to the same 'tried and true' resources over and over again.". In course research, course readings were used 97% of the time. Search engines: 96%. Library databases: 94%. Instructors: 88%. Wikipedia: 85%. (Those are the 2010 results. In 2009, everything rose except course readings.) Students are not using a lot of on-campus sources. Alison says that during 20 years of teaching, she found students were very disturbed if she critiqued the course readings. Students go to course readings not only to get situational context, but also to get big picture context, i.e., the lay of the land. They don't want you critiquing those readings, because you're disrupting their big picture context. Librarians were near the bottom, in line with other research findings. But "instructors are a go-to source." Also, note that students don't go online for all their info. They talk to friends, instructors, etc.

In everyday life research, the list in order is: Search engines 95%, Wikipedia 84%, friends and family 87%, personal collection 75%, and government sites 65%.

Students tend to repeat the same processes.

3. "Students use a strategy of predictability and efficiency." They're not floundering. They have a strategy. You may not like it, but they have one. It's a way to fill in the context.

Alison presents a composite student named Jessica. (i) She has no shortage of ideas for research. But she needs the language to talk about the project, and to get good results from searching. (ii) Students are often excited about the course research project, but they worry that they'll pick a topic "that fails them," i.e., that doesn't let them fulfill the requirements. (iii) They are often risk-averse. They'll use the same resource over and over, even Project Muse for a science course. ("I did a paper on the metaphor of breast cancer," said one student.) (iv) They are often self-taught and independent, and try to port over what they learned in high school. But HS works for HS, and not for college. (iv) Currency matters.

What's the most difficult step? 1. Getting started 84%. 2. Defining a topic 66%. Narrowing a topic 62%. Sorting through irrelevant results 61%. Task definition is the most difficult part of research. For life research, the hardest part is figuring out when you're done.

So, where do they go when they're having difficulty in course research? They go to instructors, but handouts fall short: few handouts the project looked at discussed what research means (16%). Six in ten handouts sent students to the library for a book. Only 18% mention plagiarism, and few of those explained what it is. Students want email access to the instructor. Second, most want a handout that they can take with them and check off as they do their work. Few hand-outs tell students how to gather information. Faculty express surprise at this, saying that they assume students know how to do research already, or that it's not the prof's job to teach them that. They tend not to mention librarians or databases.

Students use ibrary databases (84%), OPAC (78%), study areas (72%), check library shelves (55%), cafe (48%). Only 12% use the online "Ask a librarian" reference. 20% consult librarians about assignments, but 24% ask librarians about the library system.

Librarians use a model of scholarly thoroughness, while students use a model of efficiency. Students tend to read the course materials and then google for the rest.

Alison plays a video:

How have things changed? 1. Students contend with a staggering amount of information. 2. They are always on and always being notified. 3. It's a Web 2.0 sharing culture. The old days of dreading group projects are ending; satudents sometimes post their topics on Facebook to elicit reactions and help. 4. The expectations from information has changed.

"Books, do I use them? Not really, they are antiquated interaces. You have to look in an index, way in the back, and it's not hyperlinke."

[I moderated the Q&A so I couldn't liveblog it.]

TAGS: -berkman

Order of magnitude puzzle: Android sign-ins

One of the security options with Android lets you sign in by dragging you finger to trace a pattern you've chosen on a 3×3 square numbered 1-9. The codes have to be at least 4 digits long, you can't repeat any digit, and you can't lift your finger off the pad. To my always-wrong intuition, that seems like it affords too few possibilities. So, your task is to guess (or, if you must, figure out) roughly how many choices there are.

[Semi-Spoilers] You start with with the following range of numbers: 1,234 to 987,654,321. That is a boatload of numbers. But you remove all the numbers that have repeated digits. For a 9-digit number, there are only 362,880 numbers (9 factorial) without repeated digits, so that's like subtracting 100 million numbers from the mix. Our son Nathan says that it's the same number for all the 8-digit possibilities, because 8 factorial x 9 is the same same as 9 factorial. (I'm lost. Ask him.) After you do all of them down through 4-digits, you have to subtract the sequences that have non-contiguous numbers (based on the 3×3 square). So, it's a big number, especially since the Android UI puts in a time-out after 10 wrong tries. But it's not an astronomical number. I'm guessing it's under a million.

But I fully expect to be shown to be wildly wrong.

Going dark for SOPA

Reddit is going to go dark for 12 hours to protest SOPA. The community is going to decide what will be on the page. Well done, Reddit! I hope other sites join in. (Reddit is claiming some credit for moving Paul Ryan from neutral to anti-SOPA. It's fascinating to watch what Reddit is becoming.)

BlackOutSopa.org lets you paste a "Stop SOPA" banner across your Twitter photo with just one click. They also let you remove it once we've won.

Megan Ganz meeting notes

Megan Ganz is a writer for the TV show Community that I started out not much liking until I had seen a few episodes and now sort of love. Except that it's on "hiatus," never a happy word in TV land. Megan is undergoing community interrogation over at Reddit, and one of the comments linked to her "meeting notes." You should take a look.

[2b2k] Why Is Open-Internet Champion Darrell Issa Supporting an Attack on Open Science?

I've swiped the title of this post from Rebecca J. Rosen's excellent post at The Atlantic. Darrell Issa has been generally good on open Internet issues, so why is he supporting a bill that would forbid the government from requiring researchers to openly post the results of their research? [Later that day: I revised the previous sentence, which was gibberish. Sorry.]

Rebecca cites danah boyd's awesome post: Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry (a rant). InfoDocket has a helpful roundup, including to Peter Suber's Google+ discussion.

Made me laugh

This photo (via Reddit) made me laugh:

(Here's some context.)

This comment, from lerxstlifeson also at Reddit, made me laugh louder:

At my school there is a four way intersection with high foot traffic where "free hugs" people stand. One day on the opposite corner, a kid walked out with a sign that read "Premium Hugs $1″.

Does Google's use of 'social signals' break the Web?

There's a fascinating post at ReadwriteWeb by Scott M. Fulton III about the effect "social signals" such as posts by people within your Google+ Circles, has on search results. It is not an easy article to skim :) Here's the conclusion:

It is obvious from our test so far, which spanned a 48-hour period, that there may be an unintended phenomenon of the infusion of social signals into all Google searches: the reduction in visibility in search results of the original article that generated all the discussion in the first place. This may have a counter-balancing effect on the popularity of any article…

Library News

Did I ever mention the really useful site Matt Phillips and Jeff Goldenson at the Library Innovation Lab put up a couple of weeks ago? If you are interested in libraries and tech, Library News is a community-supported news site where you'll find a steady stream of interesting articles. Or, put differently, it's the Hacker News code redirected at library tech articles.

I have it open all day. Try it. Contribute to it. Go library hacker nuts!

[2b2k] More of moi

The Atlantic asked me five hard questions, to which I responded at some length. It's nice not to have to compress!

Andrew Keen had me on TechCrunch TV, which was generous of him. Thanks, Andrew.

[A few minutes later] The always-fresh CBC radio program, Spark, just posted a 26 minute interview with me. (Nora Young is a wonderful. There, I said it.)

Starting on the platform for the Digital Public Library of America

For the past 1.5 years or so, I've been co-director, along with Kim Dulin, of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. Among the projects we've been working on is LibraryCloud, a multi library metadata server. (You can see it at work, running underneath ShelfLife, another of our projects, here.) Today the Digital Public Library of America announced that initial (and interim) development work on the DPLA platform will be done by the LibraryCloud team — Paul Deschner and Matthew Phillips — plus our Berkman friends, Daniel Collis-Puro and Sebastian Diaz. I'm the team leader, or whatever you call the person who knows the least. We'll do this as openly as possible, relying upon the community to help at every phase, but this will be our core work during the first phase of the platform's development, leading up to an April 26 DPLA Steering Committee meeting.

The DPLA platform will enable developers to write applications using the metadata (primarily about content hosted elsewhere) the DPLA will be aggregating.

We're excited. Thrilled, actually.