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Dan: Welcome to the Full Circle Resource Kit Podcast. Joyce Valenza is a teacher/librarian at Springfield Township High School in Pennsylvania. She uses a blog called the Never-Ending Search to share her day-to-day experiences. Recently she said some things about Web 2.0 that really caught our attention. So we called her up and asked her to tell us more.

You made a comment in your blog, you said, 'We live in a wonderfully rich confusion.' And I wanted to ask you, 'What is this rich confusion that you are talking about?' It seems that we are not evaluating the same sources that we were ten years ago.

Joyce: I think it is very hard to make genre decisions about the types of information we are touching because the landscape continues to shift. You say, ten years ago, and ten years ago was 1996 when we first moved into a graphic user interface for the Web. And at that point the landscape shifted. But now all of a sudden we're moving into a Web 2.0 landscape and that's happened over only the last two years. And that shift is as dramatic as the shift where we moved from a period where people didn't understand that there really was a web where there was an Internet but it wasn't an Internet that the universe was exposed to. It started becoming pretty and people started looking at it.

That happened over ten years and then over two years we hit this place where all of a sudden the web that really had become a read-only environment became a read/write environment. And so folks who, it wasn't easy for folks to put up a webpage, but they could put up a webpage. But now it's really, really easy with browser-based applications for anybody - whether they know html, whether they have an html editor or WYSIWYG editor or whatever - they don't really even need that stuff. They can put up a blog, they can put up a wiki, they can create web space of one sort or another and have a voice in this online landscape. And so again, that changes everything.

Dan: Let me just jump in here. And just for our listeners, how do you define Web 2.0? Is it this read/write web that you are describing?

Joyce: It's that and it's bigger than that. It's blogs and wikis but it's also the kind of application that merely are browser-based, like products like Writely. It's also the sharing portals that we are finding like yodophoto and YouTube and the kinds of environments where people are just invited to upload and download. And it's also things like Flickr where ordinary people are putting up their photos. Maybe they are putting them up just for friends and family but often they are sharing them with the entire universe.

And they are beginning to become powerful users even though they may not realize it by simply creating tags or little index terms or subject descriptors for the photos they put up about their daughter's wedding or their son's Bar Mitzvah or you know whatever is happening. They are actually creating - they are contributing to this web where everybody is sharing everything and they are becoming part of the sharing whether they know it or not.

Dan: Let me ask you another question here related specifically to some of the Web 2.0 tools of blogs and wikis. What are the critical thinking skills that students need when they are evaluating blogs and wikis?

Joyce: It's sometimes very challenging to evaluate a blog. Bloggers don't always give you their credentials. When they do, that's great. So you need to go into the blog and look at 'About this blog' and see who the blogger is if that's given and why the blog was created. 'What is this blog about?' You need to look at what the blogger is writing about and where that blogger is getting their sources. Often in a blog, a blogger is synthesizing himself or herself. They are looking at the information that is out there in a particular area of knowledge and they are saying, 'OK, here's what I've read and here's what I think.'

Well, what is that blogger reading? And how is this blogger synthesizing that stuff? So, what sources is the blogger finding and who is the blogger linking to? It's good to see in Technorati, for instance, for blog posts - how many people are linking to this blog? In the world of education just for instance, and most kids aren't researching the world of education, but I know that there are bloggers who most educators read. And you can see that there are 2,000 people linking to this blog, hanging on the words of this blogger. This blogger must have influence and he or she must be important and that's important.

Dan : So that's like the community is voting and saying, 'We add credibility to this person's blog because we all agree - they're saying something that's worth listening to.'

Joyce: Absolutely. That blog is alive and there is some dynamic stuff going on you can see that in the number of people who are subscribed to the blog and in the number of people who comment and the activity in terms of the blog's dialogue. David Warlick is just one example - he says something controversial and all of a sudden other people who are highly linked to or chatting and saying, 'I agree' or 'I disagree,' and that's real interesting. But you know, an individual post, any individual post no matter how influential the blogger is, is a slice in time. So a student who pulls a particular post that might be two years aged into a story is also not working - however influential and respectable the blog - things may have changed since that post two years ago.

So you need to look at - at what point in the story did that post appear? That's a clue. Is the site itself or the blog upfront about its' bias. Bloggers definitely express opinion - does the blogger definitely tell you where he or she stands? You find many liberal and many conservative bloggers out there in the area of United States politics. They usually tell you where they are coming from and that's important. Students don't often recognize that right away. But in the 'About' or in the 'Comments' you'll begin to discern whether Arianna Huffington's blog is liberal or conservative. And that's important.

Dan: It sounds like a lot of reading though. (laughing)

Joyce: Well, if you are going to attempt to use a blog in your research you need to be able to defend it. One of the things we do in our school is we give the kids a bye generally. I'm not sure it's a great idea. We give the kids a bye when they use databases that we value, pay for and respect. When they use a blog or when they use material from what we call the free web, we ask them to defend or annotate their selections. That's really a very easy way for teachers to inject evaluation as an important skill. Not a lot of more work for the teachers but certainly it causes some metacognitive activity on the part of the student - why am I using this, am I padding my resources or is there a real reason I have selected this particular document to include in my research? And that could be something addressed in three sentences:
1. Who is the creator of this document?
2. What does it give me that none of the other documents do in my research? and
3. How did I find it? Did I find it in a Google search; did I find it in a database perhaps; did I find it through tags or an RSS feed or whatever the strategy?

But it shows the teacher the leg-work the student did to find it and the selection process. You could ask many, many more questions but maybe those three will do it in terms of having a student defend a source and think about: Why I am using - I've chosen five sources, why am I using these five out of several million?

I think what the problem is, a lot of times for students is they are walking in in the middle of a big conversation and they don't have the background. One of the things Wikipedia does nicely sometimes is provide that background. Sometimes students need a non-fiction book to provide the background. You can't ever walk into the Israeli-Palestinian argument and understand that without getting a background on how the state of Israel was formed and you don't get that by reading one single article from Time magazine.

Dan:  Well and I love the metaphor that you used that the student is joining the conversation and the challenge is to figure out: Where am I jumping into the conversation? I think for educators to model that for students as to, you know, taking a number of sources as you have suggested and saying - 'OK, this is what this voice here says in this conversation, and here's, another, you know, blog or here's a wiki that, or maybe it's Wikipedia - this is what it's saying about this particular topic' - and then helping students sort through that. That seems to be a very dynamic way of entering into the research process.

Well, thanks so much Joyce for spending some time with us and for sharing your insights.

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Dan:  This is a production of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project at the Illinois Math and Science Academy.