worldbook21cresearchskills

This is an open wiki page (anyone can edit) for your suggestions for World Book regarding 21st century research skills (see [|this blog post]). Please leave this top part as explanation and add any thoughts/resources below the line.

Of especially high importance --- if not the highest importance --- would be the ability to scrutinize sources for their depth of research, their reliability, and an overall sense of fairness. Is the source biased, or foolish? Is the medium used for academic dialogue or as a bully pulpit? --- Benjamin Baxter ([|http://awaitingtenure.wordpress.com/)]

Agree wholeheartedly with above. Ability to critically evaluate material is a key skill in an era when anyone can publish and claim to be an expert. How do we determine if a source is complete and accurate, outdated, incorrect, slanted, or malicious?

Also of importance... how to include others' ideas in one's own work (without just hitting copy and paste, and then hoping your teacher / professor doesn't know how to use Google, as many students do). Good research is using a variety of sources selectively to support your own purposes, while giving credit to the original sources. This is a skill that needs to be taught.

- Trevor Boehm ([|tboehm.wordpress.com])

To add on to Trevor's thoughts.... Students & Teachers need a good understanding of Copyright, Fair Use, and how to think critically about what they are using and how they are using it especially when using to create new content in a transformative manner

-Kristin Hokanson ([|The Connected Classroom)]

Students require the ability to annotate web pages and draw information together from many sources (using the likes of Diigo, Fleck, Zotero, or whatever new applications arise). They also need to be able to skim quickly through a vast array of sites, in order to select only the most relevant information.

- Pat Wagner ([|http://339web.blogspot.com])

I agree with everything listed so far and also think that students need to be taught the value of as well as how to search using Boolean Logic. Many of us know and use some of them daily, but a thorough review and practice of the many possibilities would surely refine the quality of the research.

-Connie Masson ([|http://cmasson50.blogspot.com/)]

Students need to be able to look for key themes, related topics, and important keywords in the information they read on a first search so they can continue into a second and third level of in-depth searching and comparison of information. Only with this sense of interelatedness of information and ideas will they be able to grasp and contextualize what they read /watch/hear on a topic new to them and begin to build an understanding that can yield synthesis. Candace Hackett Shively ([|http://blog.teachersfirst.com/thinkteach/)]

One challenge with these skills discussed here is that they seem to be those skills which are needed for students to complete academic assignments. Of course some of these are as important in the "real world", however I would suggest that some are not. It seems to me that the biggest problem for relevance in 21st C education has to do with relevance to current and emerging work experiences, environments, and challenges. --Jeff McNeill (http://jeffmcneill.com)