Group items tagged

... the lecture is no longer the only way to transfer important information. "Ever since the Middle Ages, the primary vehicle for conveying information was the lecture," he said. "But this is the 21st century, and there are so many ways to convey information, it's not the necessity it once was." Students don't learn by listening, they learn by doing, 

European game information/rating site. Similar to ESRB. A good place to go to get information on games you are considering purchasing.

"We often hear the term 'information overload' but is it a case of over-consumption as much as filter failure? There's a school of thought that says we now take in information in the same way we consume fast food-without control or moderation."

And isn't this all so ironic. We live in an information age that puts a premium on the ability to find, decode, evaluate, store and communicate information. Today's student should be in training to become a critically-thinking citizen and the best response schools can come up with is to force-feed students in sanitized information feedlots.

"The authors of this paper use characters from the 1998 film The Big Lebowski to illustrate the intricate, self-defined nature of information seeking behavior and the ways in which personal characteristics contribute to the success or failure of an information search."

results of an ethnographic study of college students and their relationship with libraries and level of information literacy...  Quote: "In other words: Today's college students might have grown up with the language of the information age, but they do not necessarily know the grammar."

Google Books can help with this. What's needed is the information that appears in a citation: the author, place, and date of publication. Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

"Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF."

The Tree of Life Web Project is a collection of information about biodiversity compiled collaboratively by hundreds of expert and amateur contributors. Its goal is to contain a page with pictures, text, and other information for every species and for each

"The United Nations Environment Program hosts a helpful interactive map displaying more than one hundred examples of environmental change around the world. Each placemark on the map has close-up views of the land and a story about environmental change at that location. For example, clicking on the placemark for Manaus, Brazil will reveal close-up imagery of site and detailed information about the environmental changes taking place. If you click through the links in the placemarks you can find the references used in constructing the information available through the map."

Excerpt re literacy:  "While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from "literary" and "informational" texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70."

  Just how important is information fluency? Well, when you consider that today more information is created in a day than we can even imagine, I'd say it's an increasingly useful skill to retain. 

Information Literacy Resources from Alan November

"A striking assumption animates arguments on both sides, namely that nonfiction is seldom literary and certainly not literature. Even Mr. Coleman erects his case on largely dispiriting, utilitarian grounds: nonfiction may help you win the corner office but won't necessarily nourish the soul. As an English teacher and writer who traffics in factual prose, I'm with Mr. Coleman. In my experience, students need more exposure to nonfiction, less to help with reading skills, but as a model for their own essays and expository writing, what Mr. Gladwell sought by ingesting "Talk of the Town" stories. I love fiction and poetry as much as the next former English major and often despair over the quality of what passes for "informational texts," few of which amount to narrative much less literary narrative. What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call "narrative nonfiction": writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways."

"What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. "  Totally supports my belief that nonfiction longreads are out there on the internet and are not being taken advantage of by teachers -- enough.

Give it a try! Hold back information and see how your students respond!  Let us know how it goes.

A website that allows you to search for information comparing & contrasting differing viewpoints.

Reading images - lots of good strategies here

Reading photos

Information architecture design -- explained in six black & white comic book illustrations -- useful in thinking about the design of websites and navigation