One idea for writing from database research

Symmetry by Grace Haley

A colleague just asked me how I go about having my students do research with periodicals, journals, and databases. On a recent episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers in March 2012, Cable Green, Mary Lou Forward and some others encouraged me to open up my teaching, so in the spirit of the Open Education Resources movement, here's essentially what I wrote in the email. This assignment is a two-day sequence where students research and write an argumentaive essay after searching through two academic databases that are available through a lot public libraries or schools.


Steps to an argumentative essay based on your initial research of a controversial issue

1. For 15-20 minutes read through the Opposing Viewpoints database, read an article, and highlight the most important pieces of evidence.  Paste that into your Google Doc that you started on Friday, add the parenthetical reference, and copy the citation at the bottom of the article.


2. For the next 15-20 minutes read through the articles found in the EBSCO database, read an article, and highlight the most important pieces of evidence.  Paste that into your Google Doc that you started on Friday, add the parenthetical reference, and copy the APA citation found at the top of the article.


3. For the next 40 minutes, write a draft of an argumentative essay keeping in mind the structure diagram that you have in your notes.

• Begin with a general statement, and then have a focused thesis in the first section
• Have at least one concession/counter-concession. Remember that good argumentation often does this more than once
• Order the evidence from weakest to strongest
• Consider concluding with EITHER the difference the evidence made to your opening paragraph OR an “echo” of the opening idea, (aka completing the “frame”)

4. Be sure to include parenthetical references as in-text citations, and a separate references section using APA style.

N.B. This photo and all photos on this blog are taken either by my students or me.

spelunking the deep web

There's been a lively discussion for the past couple of weeks on Teachers Teaching Teachers on whether the locked databases that our public libraries have access to are worth the trouble. Paul Allison does a nice analysis of the results of his search:

For me, databases start with three strikes against them: * they aren't easy to access * sources from them can't be collected in an RSS reader (EBSCOhost seems to be an interesting exception, but how do you become a member of EBSCO?) * links to sources found in a database won't work for the general reader.

Weblogs & Wikis & Feeds, Oh My!

Those a three big drawbacks to using these "deep web" resources. Maybe I've been reading too much Orwell, but what if in the future all knowledge is owned, and the only way to locate it is to learn how to navigate the labyrinthine ways of these independent databases. Take public records for instance: if we're to be citizens in a participatory democracy, we've got to teach and learn ways to get to this information (and I don't think it's readily available via a Google search). Lifehacker has a post about finding public records online.

You can use the web to find lots of things: information, videos, books, music, games, and yes, even public records. While our most private information can (usually) not be found online, you can track down items like birth certificates, marriage and divorce information, obituaries and licenses on the web. Keep reading to learn where to find public records online.

Technophilia: Where to find public records online - Lifehacker

I'm thinking that even though deep web resources can't be linked to, they can at least be excerpted from for now. And I'm also thinking that researching via RSS isn't enough, even though it may not be worth the effort.

Online research

More reasons to incorporate applications like Google Reader into our curriculum....

The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy reports that although teens spend a lot of time online, they don't spend much of that time following the daily news closely.

Teens get more news from cable news programs than from newspapers or even from the internet, according to the report, yet they watch these programs infrequently compared with older Americans. Teens spend a lot of time online, but not necessarily getting news. About a fifth of teens and young adults cited the internet as their main source for news. The report also suggests that teenagers prefer soft news over hard news, or feature stories to breaking coverage.

Poynter Online

Blogging and researching inquiry

Paul Allison has been doing some thinking about how to use Google Reader in the classroom. There was a Teachers Teaching Teachers podcast about blogging and research this past May, and there's a podcast about RSS scheduled for edtechtalk for this week.

Last year I had success getting students oriented to and enthused about Google Reader; that's the easy part. But this year I'd like to have students use this tool even better, and that means having them research things that matter. Paul has started a wiki about orienting students to Reader more efficiently this year. I like how he frames the next step:

How can we organize this in a curriculum for students? What comes first? How do we do this while also helping students start with their own questions and experiences?

Elgg Plans » Using Google Reader

For me, there's a question I first have to ask myself: where does my own inquiry come from? The answer? My own inquiry comes from my identity. It's where these identities intersect that we find our inquiry. Here's a link to a Google Doc that explains my thinking on this. And here's a link to how this manifested itself on the "Using Google Reader" wiki.