home

7. Transparency and the research process. The Web makes research a far more independent effort. Students work at home in their rooms, often late at night. They may not get, or ask for, the adult support they got in the old days. Over the past three years, for major research projects, I’ve helped our faculty move the research process online. When you use either blogs or wikis, the process becomes more interactive and transparent. Most of our teachers and students prefer to work with wikis, probably because we’ve been working together to build lessons and resource pages on that platform. Wikis are easily edited and updated. They hold media in all formats, including bookmarking widgets, video, and images of their mind maps. They preserve links. The discussion tab permits conversations between teachers, librarians, peers, and mentors, as well as intervention when a crisis is imminent or when praise is called for. I can guide learners as they find, evaluate, and organize their information, even if they don’t actually see me and ask for aid.

Students use the wiki’s navigation bar to create and edit pages that ultimately build their final projects. At Springfield we suggest that their pages include some of the following: · Driving questions · Topic brainstorm mind map · Title, introduction, scope · New vocabulary · Search terms, tags · Working thesis · Preliminary sources (annotated) · Primary sources · Journal, magazine articles (annotated) · Books, ebooks, reference sources (annotated) · Social-networking leads, experts (Twitter, Nings, etc.) · News/RSS feeds · Media (video, art, audio, etc.) · Progress reports · Final proposal · Working draft · Acknowledgments · Conclusions and findings · Reflection