Webquests, Pathfinders and Information Literacy June 24, 2008
Posted by jhurd in : Check this out! , trackbackWe’ve been having quite the animated discussion on LM-Net today, all around this article by Australian webquest guru, Tom March. In it, he wonders whether Web 2.0 has made the traditional webquest, with teacher-supplied links and pen/paper responses, obsolete. There seems to be a 50/50 split between those who agree and disagree.
It started me thinking about pathfinders, however, as I think there’s a similar issue related to them. They are as much a staple of school libraries as card catalogs, and my (middle school/high school) students and faculty love them. This is my first year at the school, and the teachers here had never seen a pathfinder before. They did as much to advocate for my program as anything else I did all year. Teachers would come in and ask, “Hey, can you make me one of those resource thingies the kids mentioned?” I was thrilled.
And yet. As the pathfinders grew more elaborate over the year, with links to the OPAC, databases, suggested books and long hotlists of websites, I started wondering if I were doing the students a disservice. Why spend two or three days teaching them how to search for and evaluate sites, then give them a long list of “approved” links? Wasn’t I defeating my information literacy goal? But teachers loved them.
I began to start each web section of the pathfinder with a group of portals and useful search engines, with a brief explanation of why they were useful and a good place to start their own searching. I also used wikis to create the pathfinders, gave students the password and encouraged them to add their own sites, making it a collaborative effort that also involved critical thinking.
If you’d like to peruse my ‘pathfinder evolution,’ you can find them here.
I’m still not entirely happy with the process; how do we balance findability with information literacy? It would be great to hear what other librarians are doing. Or is this already a settled issue and I just don’t know about it because I’m a newbie?
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?