Coaching Learners with Internet-based Research
My Thoughts Researching via the Internet
Of course we all know that everything on the Internet is true, right??? 
And Wikipedia is better than the Encyclopedia Britannica because it is updated more frequently? You didn’t all know that ??? 
I love that authors want to put out their thinking for everyone to read, but I just wish that some authors would think twice before considering themselves as scholars. In this flat world, where everybody is an author and a contributor, we have the opportunity to share so much with each other. But how do we know what is “good”? I guess this is all about figuring out who are the authorities that we listen to that begins our cognitive journey towards our own reflective judgments.
My first week of class in an on-line program brought me up short when the first reading assignment was from Wikipedia. I thought “Whoa! A masters program wants me to read Wikipedia ????!!!!!!!!!! What have I done!?” So I developed some rules, common sense really (if there were such a thing as “common” sense), which I would use for myself. So far, I feel like they are working.
- Read the assigned readings in the textbooks, and gain a general sense of the topic.
- To augment my textbook learning with the Internet, use Wikipedia to find other “key words” and sources. Sometimes I use other encyclopedic or dictionary reference sites to get me started
- Read original sources as often as possible, and go back as far up the source chain as I can, as often as I can. I hate quotes that are “so and so, as cited by somebody else”.
- Use a full article title as a search term, and try to figure out who else has used it as a resource. Often quoted items gives me a little more confidence.
- Look at the publications where the original sources were published. Are they peer reviewed? Are they a national organization? Do they have a long history with lots of authors works?
- Build a ‘database’ of sources I feel are trustworthy, and let them have more priority over new sources.
- Use the most root-level source that I can find in my Reference list, and site my work as thoroughly as possible.
An Online Tutorial
Here is a online research tutorial , called Internet Detective. It was created by Intute (Place et al, 2006), a consortium of UK universities with a mission to create a database of credible Internet resources for academia. This tutorial is part of their Virtual Training Suite, and supports many of the tactics I’ve listed above.
