Stay Connected with CTL
Main navigation | Main content
Campuses:
Hi, I am Katherine Hirsh from the Center for Teaching & Learning Services here at the University of Minnesota. I'll be co-presenting today with Melissa Kalpin Prescott from the University Libraries also here at the University of Minnesota. We're going to be talking about how to make your students into more savvy Web searchers.
What we want to urge you is to see students' Web use, and they use the Web a lot, as an opportunity. But in order to capitalize on this opportunity you need to be Web savvy yourself. You need to know what it is that students know about the Web and how they use it in order to help them use it more effectively.
One of the things that we know about students is that they don't tend to use the advanced features available with most search tools. They don't tend to know very much about what their favorite search tool indexes across; the types of documents it returns (discussed below); and they tend not to know about the wide variety of search tools that are available. Basically students are very savvy in terms of information technology skills, but in general, their information literacy is at a lower level than you might expect.
I'd like to give you a few statistics on students and other people's use of the Web. In a study conducted by Amanda Spink ("2003, Web Search: Emerging Patterns," Library Trends, Vol 52, No 2, pp. 299-306), it was found that Web users tended to use 2.6 terms per query, that is they plugged 2 to 3 words into their search engine of choice. Booleans were only used in about 10% of searches, and in studies where a higher level of Boolean use was found, about half the time the Booleans ("and," "or," etc.) were used incorrectly. The average search session involved 1.6 queries, that is, most students gave up after only a couple of attempts to find the information that they needed or they relied on what was returned on the first or second attempt. And finally, on average, only 2.35 pages of results were viewed, that is, most students did not inspect more than the first 24 items that were returned in a search.
In terms of their behavior in bibliographies, a study by Philip M. Davis (2003, "Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior: Guiding Student Scholarship in a Networked Age," Libraries and the Academy, Vol 3, No 1, pp. 41-51) noted that as Web use had increased bibliographies had become longer. However, the use of scholarly materials had kept pace with the past only when use of such materials was made a specific course requirement.
I mentioned earlier that many students aren't aware of the sorts of search tools that are available. To make you a bit more Web savvy, I'll discuss three types of search tools that are available now.
The first type are the tools with which you are probably quite familiar, search engines like Google, alltheWeb, and Altavista. Search engines work by having robots search the Web and return the full text of documents. (For some documents, such as PDF files, they don't return the full text, and we'll discuss this more fully below.) Search engines crawl the Web going from site to site and this process can be quite slow. Therefore, some of the information that search engines return can be out of date. We're all familiar with what's known as link rot," that is links that are no longer active and require you to do some additional searching if that information looks like it's going to be important to you. Additionally, because the links are generated by robots rather than human beings, the content is not evaluated. Therefore what's returned needs to be evaluated by you, the user.
The second type of search tool that is also quite common is the Web directory. Probably the most popular of these is Yahoo. (Note that Yahoo now has a search engine component in addition to its directories.) On Web directories, the sites are selected by humans and grouped under categories, hence the term, "directory." Unlike search engines, directories are not based on a full text search of each item. Instead the directories' organizers have already made decisions about what information goes under what category, leaving you to make the decision about which categories to search. Furthermore, as people select sites for inclusion, there is some evaluation of each site and sometimes some annotation. However the annotations and evaluations available are only as good as the people who created them.
Finally there are meta-search engines like Dogpile, Vivisimo, and Metacrawler. These run a search simultaneously on several search engines or Web directories and return all the results on one page. The value is that you can organize them all in one place, and typically you can sort them in several ways. However, many meta-search engines do not use the advanced features available at each of the sites at which they submit your query. Additionally, it is sometimes unclear how the results of your meta-search correspond to a set of searches run on each of the sites individually.
Hi, I'm Melissa Kalpin Prescott from the University Libraries at the University of Minnesota.
We already talked about how we know that students are using search engines to find Web resources. But do we know what kinds of Web resources they are missing when they are using these search engines? Many types of sources are not included in the databases of most search engines, either due to specific policy decisions or to technical limitations. These sources make up the "deep Web" (sometimes called the "invisible Web"). Note that as technology advances, an increasing number of items that are currently deep Web sources will become visible to search engines, even as some newer file types remain hidden. So the deep Web will continue to change.
Some current deep Web sources include directories such as phone books or postal codes; information that is new or constantly changing such as weather information or stock quotes; certain file types like PostScript, Flash, Shockwave, and longer PDF and MSWord files (for example Google stops indexing PDF files greater than 125 kilobytes); and content in databases or tables. Even though databases may be available via the Web, you need to actually search the index within that database to find information stored within it. The data won't necessarily be returned from a Google or Yahoo search.
You are using the deep Web when you are searching the library catalog, a specialized subscription-based article index such as Lexis-Nexis, and the content of many full text e-journals. Since these high quality scholarly sources are not generally included in Google or other search engines, how can you ensure that students find the information sources appropriate to their research and course assignments?
First, encourage your students to use your institution's library's Web site to access these databases directly, thereby using the search tool designed for that particular database.
Second, recommend that your students try a specialty search engine. Some specialty search engines include only scholarly sources and are developing technology to try to harness as much deep Web content as possible. An example of a specialty search engine is Scirus, a science-specific search engine. Links to a number of specialty search engines such as Scirus are included in the Beyond Google text portion of this workshop.
While search engines like Google and AltaVista strive to include as much of the Web as possible in their databases, specialty search engines like those discussed previously typically require that resources meet a set of criteria before adding them to their databases. This selection process is similar to that used in academic library collections where librarians evaluate and select resources appropriate to the curriculum of an educational institution and also to the process that faculty and instructors use to evaluate and select resources for their students to use for a particular class. Students then search this collection of selected resources to find the information they need for their assignments and research projects.
When searching the Web at large however, the responsibility of resource evaluation and selection falls to the user. Combine this with the incredibly large results lists usually generated by search engines, and the task of finding useful, high quality resources can be quite daunting.
There are two main ways to help students become effective searchers and consumers of Web resources.
First, encourage them to use the advanced features of their favorite search tools. Google, for example, lets you limit a search by domain such as .edu or.gov, thereby returning only education and government Web sites. You can also limit your search to a particular file type such as shorter PDF or MS Word files. Google also has a feature that lets you search for all of the Web sites that link to a specific Web page as well as an occurrences feature that allows you to limit your search for a term to a particular part of a Web page such as in the Web page title or the Web page URL.
Second, make sure students understand and use smart evaluation criteria when selecting Web resources. Useful criteria include looking critically at a Web site's:
There are many online resources that discuss critical evaluation in more depth. Many of these sites also provide activities for students to use to reinforce these concepts. These are listed in the Evaluating Web Content portion of this workshop.
One way to help your students become more savvy Web searchers is to require them to use the Web in their assignments. There are two ways the Web can be incorporated into your courses. The first is that students can be required to use the Web as a resource - a resource which allows them to create a written or other media product. The second is to assign them to use or to create a Web-based learning object.
When using the Web as a resource for an assignment, encourage your students to reflect on how they use the Web and other resources by asking them to create a usage log. In this log they record both what they found, the content, and the process they used to find each piece of information. The log could be in the form of an "annotated Webliography." What is key, however, is that the log details not just what was found, but also the process used to find it. This process encourages them to become aware of their searching habits as well as to become conscious of how they conducted the research that produced their assignment.
Such a log might usefully include the name of the search tools they used (search engines, Web directories, or specialty search engines), the search terms or query terms used, and the Web sites they visited, including an annotation of each. Encourage your students to
complete an evaluation of each of the sources they find. These evaluations can then be used by students to determine which Web sources to cite, and to provide a justification or rationale for those citation selection decisions.
Encourage students to create more than just an annotated Webliography with Web resources. Think about working with them to create "pathfinders," annotated guides to a variety of resources including Web sites, but also print; video and film; audio and recorded resources; sources from collections such as libraries and museums; and human resources, such as organizations, institutions, groups and individuals with expertise or information on a topic. It is just as useful here to ask them how they discovered these sources as to ask them to describe what these sources offer.
A second type of assignment you can give students is to ask them to use or create a Web-based learning object. One simple sort of Web resource they can create is the Webliography or annotated pathfinder that you publish on the Web. When students create this in a form that can be used on the Web, they create a resource that both they and future students can contribute to and benefit from. Added value comes in these assignments if the class pools their resources and organizes the resources available by topic and provides annotations for each resource of in terms of its value for the course and in general. The fact that the assignment is published and viewable by their peers places a gentle pressure on them to write more polished prose and gives the project a greater sense of meaning.
The Webliography discussed above could, if archived on line, be just that sort of resource. In the Sample Assignments text portion of this workshop we offer a few examples of projects of this sort.
The second approach is to ask them to interact with an online learning resource. One collection of online learning objects is MERLOT - The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The resources on MERLOT can be browsed by subject area or by publication date. Items on MERLOT are peer reviewed and many have associated comments by MERLOT members. An item may also be linked to assignments. In addition, it may be a part of a collection, established by one of MERLOT's members, which gathers together resources that appear on the MERLOT site that an individual feels are useful for a particular course or topic. There is also a member directory which gives you access to material created by and reviewed by members as well as listing special areas of interest.
Your students use the Web a lot, but they tend not to know about the advanced features of the tools that they use. They tend not to know about the sorts of things that are available on the deep or invisible Web. And they also tend not to know about the variety of search tools that are available and in particular some of the specialized tools (found in the Beyond Google text portion of this workshop). Students are very savvy in terms of information technology but they are not terribly savvy in terms of information literacy. This is where you as the instructor can be the most help.
Stay Connected with CTL
Center for Teaching and Learning
University Office Plaza, Suite 400, 2221 University Ave. S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55414