The Common Loon
This weblog about facilitating lifelong learning in a digital age is maintained by Shanta Rohse. I created it to support a graduate independent study course I am taking at Athabasca University's Centre for Distance Education in Winter 2005. You can find out more about me from my personal web site.
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Tag It!
~ an application of the Tag It! pattern: recently tagged websites via del.icio.us ~
Extract It!
~ an application of the Extract It! pattern: a
real time boolean search via PubSub ~
Why the loon?
It's from an old reading blanket that's incubated many a lifelong learning project.
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Go berrypicking**
This pattern is based on Bates’ (1989) Berrypicking model of information retrieval.
You want to search online about a topic that is unfamiliar to you.
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The sheer volume and variability of sources on the internet make search complex. If you are unfamiliar with the domain, you may not know what sources exist, how to frame the research question, or what search terms to use. Unfortunately, search engines typically require that you present an structured, precise query that can be matched to the database contents to produces a single set of results (note: there are exceptions).
An underdeveloped research question produces less meaningful search results.
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Therefore, use the results to refine and redefine your research question until the results are meaningful.
Search is iterative: the search question and result co-evolve. Start with just one feature of the broader topic and move through a wide variety of sources. Retrieve information a bit at a time, not all at once. Look for potential ideas and new directions and repeat with a refined query. Bates (1989) calls this strategy berrypicking and the shifting nature of queries an evolving search.
You may be tempted to restrict your search among a small set of familiar sites. (Tauscher & Greenberg, 1997 in Candy, 2004). However, a broadly scoped search will offer more opportunities. “Berries are scattered on the bushes; they do not come in bunches” (Bates, 1998, p. 4).
Don’t get lost. After pursuing a string of new directions, you may find yourself far afield from where you started, and unable to assimilate this new information into the original context. Fortunately, there are patterns for that too.
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Bates (1989) suggests six ways to search for bits and pieces: footnote chasing, citation searching, journal run, area scanning, subject searches in bibliographies and abstracts, and author searching, These may be subpatterns..
The online bookshop, Amazon.com, lets you find books by linking to other books by the same author, on the same topic, with the same reviewer or even other purchasers.
CiteSeer, a database of computer and engineering documents that uses autonomous citation indexing, lets you query a chain of documents.
Note: See family of patterns associated with assimilating information and insights.
posted by: Shanta at 18:04 |
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design, lifelong, learning, patterns
