knitting librarian

Tomorrow Dad arrives, Thursday Deanna arrives, Saturday day, Dad and I are going to do something with AJ—maybe the Y, then Christmas eve at Brian and Jenn’s, Sunday everyone will be here to open/watch AJ open Christmas presents. Monday, we’ll visit Mom and Vince, Tuesday we’ll spend with Deanna until her flight takes off, mid-afternoon, I’m off to the doctor, Tuesday night, dad’s back with us through Thursday. Rob, thankfully will take dad to the airport cutting down on the gazillion trips we’ll be making in the coming week. (Thanks li’l bro!)

Nature’s original report, “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head” gives a little more detail than was reported in SMS.

“Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.”

“Editors at Britannica would not discuss the findings, but say their own studies of Wikipedia have uncovered numerous flaws. “We have nothing against Wikipedia,” says Tom Panelas, director of corporate communications at the company’s headquarters in Chicago. “But it is not the case that errors creep in on an occasional basis or that a couple of articles are poorly written. There are lots of articles in that condition. They need a good editor.””

And Robert Eiffert commented today on LM_NET that “Giving “undue prominence to controversial scientific theories”, lets discussion move from, for example, ‘what are short and long term effects of global warming’, or ‘where is the tipping point?’ to ’ does global warming exist?’.”

I guess the jury will be out for quite some time on whether Wikipedia should be considered a reliable source or not. It’s clear that most librarians will scorn its authority and reliability, but that doesn’t mean our students will. Educating them is one of those “the best defense is a good offense” stories where we show the value of the paid subscription databases that are provided to them through their libraries (school, university, and public) and hope that some of it sticks!

I read this morning and it’s is causing me to rethink some of my negative opinions of Wikipedia. It seems that WP and EB had comparable rates of inaccuracies which is pretty impressive.

I guess I’ll reserve judgement a bit longer but still work to ensure that students access a broad variety of resources.

“Beyond the Bird Unit” by Jennifer Robins Teacher Librarian December 2005

This article looks at David Loertscher’s 2004 book, Ban Those Bird Units and goes beyond, including several examples of inquiry based projects that encourage student-led research rather than forcing them to fit into a one-size fits all research project where they just regurgitate facts rather than creating their own knowledge based on information gathered from a variety of sources.

I particularly liked this project: Students will write a newspaper or magazine article about one of the key events in the civil rights movement, written from the perspective of the participant.

Information Literacy skills/standards addressed: IL 1.4 and 3.1, 3.2, 3.4

I will share this article with Chad as part of our Study Group so that we have some “inspiration” as we develop our research project for the spring. Right now, I’m thinking that if we can tie it into Cultural Diversity Day we could look at the immigrant experience of a variety of countries and create a really neat project for display at the park.

I think I need Loertscher’s book!