I am teaching Spanish for Heritage Speakers this semester and our textbook brags about incorporating a ton of technology-based activities, which is great, since we're lucky enough to have class one day per week in the same computer lab where our ITL2TL class is held.
However, the more I get to know the textbook, the more I realize that the alleged 'technology based activities' are usually called " [insert cultural topic of the unit] en el ciberespacio" (ciberespacio = cyberspace) and the instructions can be summarized as follows: "type [insert cultural topic] into your favorite browser & see what comes up." To give a more concrete example, the students essentially Google things like 'chicano identity' and 'pachuco culture.' Experience (at least with my current group of students) has shown that this is pretty ineffective unless I add my own structure or spin.
I feel like a lot of textbooks just want to say they have a technology component but don't make any effort to address the fact that just googling something is ok, but it's not going to be very productive for the student if he/she doesn't have any kind of framework with which to analyze, organize, or filter the search results. In addition, as we all know, fake or inaccurate information abounds on the Internet, and as we've discussed in class, many of the students lack enough Internet literacy to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' when it comes to websites.
The Internet is SUCH a powerful tool, and I'm all for the students discovering information on their own and helping to create their own course content, but just as you wouldn't pose a question like "what is chicano identity" to a beginning level language students without breaking it down into smaller units (because it's too open ended and not structured enough), we shouldn't be telling students to 'find information on the Internet' and leave it at that.
Have you guys had similar experiences teaching? Do you have any suggestions about making a structured, manageable activity that involves Internet search?
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Katie, you might want to look at some of the library's resources for internet research. I don't know how well they would fit into your curriculum, but there are some useful activities there about finding and evaluating info on the web. Start looking at the following site, and you might also check to see if there's anything interesting in the subject guides. http://library.arizona.edu/help/tutorials/index.html
ReplyDeleteYou're really talking about 'information literacy', an issue a lot of libraries these days are dealing with, since so many believe that 'digital native' means 'information literate', when in fact, it doesn't. Amy's right, search for 'activities for information literacy' and you'll probably find some good stuff--if you do, pass them on. Later in the semester we'll be talking about it, too.
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