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Teaching students how to research often involves what not to do as much as what they should do. That is, don’t take credit for ideas that aren’t yours. Today we have unprecedented access to information, which can make it tempting to not credit a source, or to commit unintentional plagiarism. You can find lots of information to help you teach about this form of cheating at Guidelines and Resources for Avoiding Plagiarism, a website from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The site has definitions of plagiarism, policy guidelines, plus information tailored specifically for teachers, students and parents. Naturally, like any good plagiarism resource, this site properly credits its sources in its works cited section. -BILL FERRIS

Guidelines and Resources for Avoiding Plagiarism

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Photo credit: cheesebikini on flickr

By now you’re surely familiar with Google Book Search, the project to digitize and display millions of books, which began in 2004. You’ve doubtless noticed that ordinary Google searches now turn up results from books, so that a student’s search for “Silas Marner” will point her not just to Wikipedia, but to the text and page images of the book itself on http://books.google.com. You may even have heard that Google recently settled a lawsuit brought by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over whether the search company had the right to scan in-copyright material and display parts of such material in search results.

It is our delightful task, however, to tell you about something we’re guessing you haven’t heard of: Google Book Search previews. You can now use Google Book Search’s “Preview Wizard” to generate a little virtual book that will fit in a small square of your web page or blog. All you need is the book’s ISBN number, access to your web site’s underlying code, and the courage to copy and paste snippets of JavaScript. (If you have a WordPress blog, use Design and Widgets to insert the code; if you have a Blogger.com blog, use Layout and Edit HTML.) By default, what appears is a picture of the book’s cover with clickable arrows that let you page back and forth in the book, though you might want to choose other display options. Some books will grant you access to the full text, while others will give you only a few pages or chapters, but in both cases this widget is a great way to encourage your screen-dazed students toward books.

It’s also worth noting that libraries, bookstores, and book-oriented sites are taking advantage of the same technology on a larger scale; Google Book Search previews are available from the websites of WorldCat, LibraryThing, GoodReads, Books-a-Million, and many more. Happy reading (online)! — AMANDA FRENCH

Google Book Search Preview Wizard

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Some people discourage you, telling you not to “reinvent the wheel.” Other people will give you too much encouragement, saying “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Do not listen to either of these people. Both are trying to distract you with nonsensical feedback while they secretly steal your inventions and race to the patent office. While its clear that I have an obvious mistrust for others concerning my inventions (potato chip clip AND TV remote combined), don’t let my negativity infect your science classroom.

Originally published few years back, this article by the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) takes a rigorous look at one invention that is assumed to work just fine the way it exists: the parachute. Apparently, we’ve assumed parachutes to be a successful way of preventing death by “gravitational challenge” based purely on anecdotal evidence — there hasn’t been a single study that included controlled, randomized, double-blind parachute placebo groups. Without such a study, can we really know for sure that skydivers wouldn’t fare as well with a placebo instead of a parachute?

Their intent was to satirize criticisms about health interventions based off observational data by advocates who prefer evidence based findings. You, however, can use it with your students to spark an interest in challenging assumptions and looking at things from a different angle. While the article is tongue-in-cheek, it works on a fundamental level in that it is still an interesting, solid example for students trying to write a scientific research paper to see just how a scientific research paper gets written. Abstract, objective, data sources, citations—they are all in there. -NICK YINGLING

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials via BMJ

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Many teachers worry about their students’ reliance on Google as a way of finding information. If you can’t get them to become library junkies, you can at least prove to them that how they do research affects what information they find. A neat little visualization tool called Thumbshots.com Ranking can help.The Ranking tool allows you to compare searches on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines by displaying a row of dots representing web pages, arranged in the same order that they appear in a particular set of search results. Hovering over a dot will show you a small preview, or “thumbshot,” of the page. One thing you’ll quickly see is that there’s not much overlap: pages that show up in Google results often don’t show up in Yahoo! results and vice versa.

Pages that do show up in both sets of results are highlighted in blue, and blue lines allow you to compare where the pages rank in each set of results. In the Yahoo! results for “water on Mars,” for instance, a 2001 article published on NASA’s website ranks 3rd; the same page ranks only 35th in Google’s results. The Ranking tool also allows you to highlight a particular site so that you can see, for instance, where Wikipedia is in each set of results. Moreover, you can teach your students about the importance of search words by showing them that searching Google for “water on Mars” returns significantly different results than searching Google for “Mars water.”

Once you’ve constructed and conducted a lesson whose moral is “Different searches produce different results,” you might want to explore any number of different search engines. Metasearch engines such as Dogpile and Clusty are search engines of search engines that compile results from several different sources. Search engines such as Grokker, Cuil, and Mahalo display information in dramatically different ways from the big three (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search). There’s a whole world to search out there, and a whole bunch of ways to search it. –AMANDA FRENCH

Thumbshots.com Ranking

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Whenever I hear of a new study connecting something terrible to something we used to think was safe, I think of the Wizard of Oz. Even after Dorothy reveals that old Oz is a fraud, he insists that she “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Though our imaginations may be eager to accept the latest hypothesis as scientific fact, we don’t always have the means to look behind the curtain for proof.

Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know? deals with the role evidence plays in establishing scientific truth. In the words of the site’s creators at the Exploratorium Museum, “this project uses case studies to examine how scientists construct a functional understanding of the world by gathering, assessing, and making use of scientific evidence.” The featured case study explores questions about human origins through a series of interviews with anthropologists and other scientists. The lesson begins with a comparison between humans and their primate relatives and ends with a discussion of what we can learn from mankind’s fossil record.

My favorite part of the site is called Can You Believe It? It’s a list of seven questions to ask about any scientific claim, which not only apply to the information found in the case study on human origins, but which can also be used to analyze and assess any science-based article. Best of all, you’re given the option to view the current day’s science headlines, allowing students and teachers alike to scan for evidence to decide for themselves if the latest discovery is science fact or science fiction. –JIMI RADABAUGH

Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know?

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With so much information available online, the printed newspaper might not have much time left. In the information age, opening the paper today to read about what happened yesterday seems incredibly slow. They’re not searchable, and their size is unwieldy for folks used to reading news on a laptop or iPhone. Plus they generate waste, and your fingers get all inky. That said, I’ve fond memories of reading through the funnies and the sports section on Sunday mornings as a kid. My wife wrote for a daily paper, too. The newspaper was our culture’s medium of record for generations, and it deserves better than to merely vanish into obsolescence.

Leave it to Google to make newspapers searchable. Google will partner with newspaper publishers to digitize archived issues and make more papers available online. You can still read them as they were originally printed — that includes headlines, articles, photos, ads, letters to the editor, maybe even an ink smudge or two. “Over time,” the Google blog says, “as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well.” Cool!

Google’s newspaper digitization project will allow your students to use primary source material to view history through the lens of people experiencing it. It also means they won’t have to head to the library to squint at microfiche editions of old newspapers for that research paper you assigned them.

Sure, the newspaper doesn’t have as many features as today’s online media, but it’s an important part of our heritage as an informed society. Now a lot of that heritage will be available digitally, and easier to access than ever before. I just hope they don’t forget to digitize the funny pages. -BILL FERRIS

Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time via the Official Google Blog

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Earlier we told you about Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff). Today, you’ll learn about the Groups part of the name. In addition to having awesome annotation tools, it also has a lot of great ways to share information with others, formal and informal. First you can send bookmarks not just to other Diigo members you’re “friends” with (sort of like the for:username feature in del.icio.us), but also to emails (I use it to send stuff to my spouse who refuses to join a social bookmarking site), and to your existing del.ico.us account. That’s the easy stuff. You can also form more formal groups within Diigo. You can share bookmarks (with your notes) to a group, and it will appear in the groups bookmarks.

It doesn’t stop there though. There’s a full discussion forum feature, so you can have a discussion where you invite other individual Diigo members to discuss a bookmark or just ideas for that matter, or you can have a discussion within a Group you belong to. Think of how you could use that with students to facilitate discussions around online reading. It takes the social part of social bookmarking to the next level. Some teachers have even used this feature to form study groups for students. -ALICE MERCER

Diigo

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Instructify is finally letting me share information about one of my favorite online tools, Diigo. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool, but so much more. In addition to letting you bookmark pages, you can also annotate them. There are two tools you can use for this, highlighting and comments. Highlighting lets you highlight the actual text on a web page, and stores the highlighted words with your bookmark.Think of how useful this can be for online reading assignments in a class (no wonder it’s caught on with some high school AP teachers).

In addition to highlighting text, you can leave comments behind, and even position them using floating sticky notes. You can use these to direct students to specific part of a page, or leave vocabulary or other tips explaining parts of text that may be a little complex for students. Just go to Diigo, sign up and download the Diigo toolbar (or lighter Diigolet bookmarklet). -ALICE MERCER

FYI: it’s pronounced dee-go (Digest of Internet Information Groups and Other stuff).

Diigo

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Visual Web searching is apparently the hot new trend (see previous entries on Cuil and RedZee). If you’d rather get your search results in pictures instead of words, you should definitely have a look at Searchme, by far the most visually impressive visual search engine.

Searchme takes a page from iTunes’ Cover Flow interface. And by a page, I mean pretty much the whole darn book. Searchme brings up a screen shot of each search result, and you can flip through each like you would album covers in iTunes. Yeah, so it’s not totally original. But it looks really, really nice, and you can get an instant look at a site before you visit.

You can save your searches in “stacks,” in which you collect your visual search results for later use like a stack of baseball cards in a shoebox. Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Web 2.0 tool if you couldn’t share your stacks with your friends. You can also filter out adult content, and have video results play automatically.

Searchme is still in Beta, so you might find a bug or two. But it looks so good, you won’t care. -BILL FERRIS

Searchme

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Pencils? Check.

Notebooks? Check.

Online word processor application? Check.

In addition to standbys like pens, pads, and the ever-popular Trapper Keeper, today’s learners need a new set of school supplies, too.  These tools enable students to take advantage of the new learning possibilities the Web has to offer, such as making research easier, or finding better, cheaper ways of doing what they’re already doing.

In that spirit, here’s my top 10 new-school school supplies (all of which, by the way, are completely free).

1. OpenOffice — Why pay a bunch of money to Microsoft when you can get top-quality, MS-compatible programs for free? The OpenOffice suite packs a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software, graphics software, and a database program. The open-source OpenOffice can do pretty much anything Microsoft Office can do, except drain your bank account.
2. A Cell phone — Whether it’s for podcasting, conducting surveys, or staying organized, the cellular phone has a huge amount of educational potential for those who know how to use it.
3. Remember the Milk –Back in my day, I wrote inky scribbles on my palm to stay organized. Today’s kids have Remember the Milk, which can keep track of assignments, activities, chores, and all applicable due dates and priorities. It also has fewer smudges.
4. Diigo — Invaluable for research, Diigo lets students bookmark and annotate webpages so they won’t forget why they bookmarked a page in the first place. They can also read other folks’ notes or annotations for further insight. Like any good Web 2.0 tool, Diigo lets them share their bookmarks and annotations with friends, too.
5. BibMe — Once students have found some great sources on Diigo, how do they cite them? Nobody has the time or energy to leaf through their MLA style manual to find the proper citation format for a newspaper article or whatever. If your students can muster the effort to enter a title, author, or ISBN number, BibMe will do the hard part and churn out a citation pre-formatted for the bibliography. If only the entire research paper process was this simple.
6. Google Docs — Does many of the things OpenOffice does. Google Docs also adds a collaborative element, as multiple students will be able to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation.
7. OpenDrive – No more excuses about hard drive crashes. OpenDrive offers 1GB of storage online. Students can sync it with files on their hard drive for backups, collaborate with friends on projects, or use it to store their ever-expanding music collection. And for the time being at least, it’s free.
8. VoiceThread — A slideshow with a soundtrack, VoiceThread lets students tell stories visually as well as textually. Easily upload video, audio, even record narration via their cell phone (I told you those things were handy), with any luck VoiceThread will replace PowerPoint.
9. Adobe Photoshop Express Beta — If you thought Microsoft Office was expensive, check out the price tag for Adobe Photoshop. Fortunately, Photoshop Express Beta performs most of the photo editing functions students will need without costing a cent. They don’t even have to download anything. Now that’s express!
10. PB Wiki — Wikis are great for class projects and to cross-reference other pieces of information. And PB Wiki makes setting up a wiki a breeze, even if you don’t know a wiki from a blog.

As with any top 10 list, I had to exclude other worthy applications. Now’s your chance to tout your favorites (or to tell me what a jerk I am) in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Okay, so cell phones aren’t exactly free. However, your students probably own them already, and most of the educational uses for them won’t cost you anything to implement.

Photo credit: jgodsey on flickr

I discussed how Wikipedia is more of a work in (constant) progress, rather than a finished product. A big part of how that happens is the ongoing discussion that contributors have. There is a little magic tab at the top of each Wikipedia article that will take you into the discussions that give you a look at the “editorial” process at Wikipedia. Since everyone can contribute and edit, the editorial meetings are as open as the rest of the process. You can learn a lot about an article or subject by reading the discussions. Or at least take the measure of a particular contributor.Discussions are great to look at whenever you see flags on an article about tone, accuracy, or controversy, and offer insight into what’s going on. I have two favorite examples of this. The first is for the article on Jesse Jackson which needless to say has a lot of controversy and contention associated with it (in addition to vandalism). It’s interesting to see the discussion at this time (and it will change if you catch this article more than a month or so after it’s published) about Jesse Jackson’s remarks regarding Barack Obama. Last time I looked (a year ago) there was a lot of commentary around the PUSH years in Chicago, and vandalism. The great thing about the discussion tab is that with a controversial public figure, you can at least see the discussion and process of how things came to the current point they are at.

Next, on more obscure topics, you can get some illumination or insight you might otherwise not get. I found this when looking at the Wikipedia page on the Hmong (which are a significant portion of my student population). The discussion page for Hmong had a very interesting discussion about the term “Miao.” This ethnic group had originally come out of China, into present day Laos/Vietnam, and now in refugee camps in Thailand, with some coming to the U.S., where the term is considered derogatory. Some contributors from China where contending that with changes following the revolution, it no longer had a stigmatized status in China proper. It showed the various layers in this ethnic group because of it’s long diaspora status. -ALICE MERCER

Carolyn Foote’s wonderful article on the Wikipedia discussion page

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If you haven’t heard, not only do some professors not want students to use Wikipedia for research papers, Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, also thinks this is a bad idea.

Why? Well, here is the quote from Mr. Wales himself…

No, I don’t think people should cite it, and I don’t think people should cite Britannica, either — the error rate there isn’t very good. People shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias in the first place. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level. And really, it’s more reliable to read Wikipedia for background than to read random Web pages on the Internet.

But, there maybe some circumstances where you need to cite Wikipedia. Let’s look at some of them:

1. A report on Wikipedia, or how something is treated in Wikipeida.
2. If you require students to list entry level documents they read (like encyclopedias and other reference documents) to get to their other sources (Wikipedia can be a great source for further reading). Some teachers like to see the development of a student’s research by doing this.
3. In primary and middle school, it’s more common to allow students to use encyclopedias to some extent in their reports.

Jimmy Wales may not want you to cite Wikipedia, but that doesn’t stop them from making it easy with a built in citation generator. Just look in the left column under tool box and you’ll see “cite this page.” Click and it will give you loads of examples like this, for paracelsus, with choices for formats including APA, MLA, MHRA, Chicago (Turabian), CSE, Bluebook, AMA, and BibTeX. However, the citation generator does come with this caveat at the top:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information — citing an encyclopedia as an important reference in footnotes or bibliographies may result in censure or a failing grade. Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research.

As with any community-built reference, there is a possibility for error in Wikipedia’s content — please check your facts against multiple sources and read our disclaimers for more information.

You can’t say that they didn’t warn you, or make your life easier. Remember, use it with caution. -ALICE MERCER

Citing Wikipedia from Wikipedia

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Search 121,617,892,992 Web pages. That’s what new search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”) promises when you need to find information online.

Cuil’s hook is that they analyze webpage content rather than just looking at a site’s popularity (Google, they’re looking in your direction). Founded by former Google employees, a lot of Cuil’s features seem to be in direct response to things they didn’t like about Google — there’s the photo-negative black background, results that incorporate pictures rather than plain text only, searching far more pages, and Cuil doesn’t collect user data or track what you search. Even the name — cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge — takes the same approach as Google’s new Knol encyclopedia, which they define as a unit of knowledge.

Reactionary upstart or anti-copycat? The correct answer is, “I don’t care.” I gave Cuil a spin and it seems to work well (though the images it pulled up were often pretty random). I think looking at results in a new way can help me find what I’m looking for, or to find some neato new thing I wasn’t expecting. Now that’s pretty Cuil cool. -BILL FERRIS

Cuil

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If you are on a computer, and visiting a blog like Instructify, you probably already know something about Wikipedia. But what exactly do you know? You may think it’s like an encyclopedia, but not as accurate–”Hey, if my 10 year old nephew can add to it, how good can it be?”

Well, it depends on who you ask — for example, academics rate it higher than lay people, while scientists at Nature.com and the folks at Britannica differ on which resource is more accurate.

While Wikipedia is used like an encyclopedia, it has some fundamental differences. Encyclopedias have articles written and edited by experts. However, they have their own set of problems and inaccuracies (see here). When comparing the two, people often come in with the assumption that encyclopedias are “accurate.”

Wikipedia’s weakness is that any yahoo as well as any expert can edit it. What about when it works? Its strength is that it undergoes constant evolution and that can lead to more and better information, not just vandalism. Click on the picture above to see a timelapse video (sped up) of the first 24 hours of edits on the Wikipedia page on the July 7, 2005 London Train Bombings. People are adding more information, correcting information, and making it better. Think about that conceptually and the often static nature of encyclopedias, and you begin to wrap your brain around how it ends up being so useful and more up to date than other resources.

Big thanks to ars techica for the great articles on Wikipedia and, Mathew Needleman for the video. -ALICE MERCER

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If your students can put together a Web quest by this Friday, they’ll have a chance to win an eight gigabyte iPod Touch (yeah!).

Youth Media Exchange (ymex) is sponsoring a contest to try and create interest in their user-generated quests. Each quest is an inquiry-based research assignment that challenges students to answer (and ask) pertinent questions about issues such as the environment, poverty or education.

To quote the ymex website, quests will be evaluated on the following criteria:

1) Is it fun - will others be likely to want to do it?
2) Does it keep the focus on the issue it addresses?
3) Is it challenging enough but not too much that nobody will want to complete it?
4) Will digital literacy skills and/or enhanced critical thinking about media be gained?
5) Is it participatory, does it encourage interaction and collaboration with other ymex members?

For more information, check out the contest forum — FYI, pay no attention to the August 4 deadline. The front page of their site states they’ve extended the deadline until August 8. And if they’ve extended the deadline, it’s probably because they haven’t gotten many good entries, which means your students have a good chance of winning. So get a move on! -BILL FERRIS

Create-a-Quest Contest