Writing connected research

Adventure by Ben Harvey

In my last post I wrote about the connected research and social scholarship that's happening in my classroom. The most significant way those things manifest themselves is through the discussions that my students post on Youth Voices. The students search for information about their inquiry as they learn to navigate different resources and then post the most interesting things they discovered on their Youth Voices blogs. After all the blogging and discussing at the end of the unit, they distill the most compelling information into the traditional research paper format.

Is their writing that's done for the screen better than their writing for paper, or vice-versa? I don't know. But what I do know is that I need to prepare my students for both types of composition, at least for the immediate future. And I also know that students now need to understand how to access and assess information from a lot of different sources. For example, some of these databases and resources I use are open; others are locked behind paywalls or only accessible through library subscriptions (more on that later).

If you're interested in doing this yourself, here is some information about the resources and databases the students use as they blog and discuss their findings:

• Read some Opposing Viewpoints about a current political issue. 
• Using the date range advanced search feature in Google, read recent news articles written about your topic. 
• Search using the Gale database available through our school library.
• Search the EBSCO database, available to all students in our state. 
• Use the Google top-level site operator, read the different types of information available through .org .edu .mil .gov .info etc.
• Interview experts with extensive knowledge of your topic.
• Search Twitter and blogs for real-time information. For this and all posts do the assessing credibility exercise

Young World education

Rob Salkowitz in Young World Rising predicts that the economy of the near future favors countries like India, Brazil, and Nigeria, whose younger populations that have grown up digital are better leveraged for the knowledge economy. Our politicians have been hammering home education's role in this new economy for a while too, but many of their ideas for education reform usually see curriculum as a way to teach "skills" so that our students are well-equipped to be the workers of tomorrow.

But this book made me think of education reform in a different light, especially near the end of the book in the section titled "Plan for Uncertainty." Xenophobia and parochialism are growing stronger in the U.S., that seems plain enough. A lot of people see this trend as detrimental to out nation's health. In early 2010 Former Republican member of Congress from Iowa and current NEH chair Jim Leach launched a civility tour in response to the trend in order to try to encourage more healthy argumentation across American society.

There's another way to look at the decline of civil dialogue in our country with Salkowitz's book in mind – the economic view.  If the impending knowledge economy favors Young World countries, it's conceivable that the U.S. will need to meet Bottom of the Pyramid economies on more equal footing. Global literacy seems to be a key component of this curriculum, and that doesn't seem to be emphasized enough in our debates about how schools need to change.

We won't be as successful in our business with the Young World if we become a nation of xenophobes.