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The need for "Research Quality" search engines
Opportunities for improvement -- Serving teachers
Servant of students
Think back on the teachers that made a difference in your life. Probably they enjoyed their field of study and showed it. But much more, they cared about students. To them, what goes on in the students is all-important. Your best teachers caught on to a simple principle: the objective in education is not teachers teaching. The teacher can take pride in being a servant of a higher goal -- students learning.
The teacher is not conscious of being a marketer. Think of it, though. Through ongoing dealings with the students, the teacher is very aware of student needs. Prompted by these needs, the teacher-as-marketer puts in long hours to organize resources, shape classroom experiences, and expose students to content in ways that arouse their "AIDA" -- Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
Hence the teacher has a strong interest in the tools for learning that are made available to students.
Introductory courses and broad scope
The student's exposure to a discipline starts at a survey level, covering lots of content, but with little depth. The student picks up the basic vocabulary -- the words and phrases that convey ideas quickly and with precision among practitioners -- "debits" and "credits" for the bookkeeper, "ontological" and "metaphysical" for the philosopher, etc. Learning in introductory courses comes in bursts, with periods of frustration (swimming in unfamiliar terms) interspersed with "eureka" moments. Unless the teacher is careful, the student will feel swamped by excess material and be turned off by the discipline.
Therefore the teacher will want to provide access to tools that catch the sweep of the discipline, but that at the same time make it simple to review new phrases within a variety of contexts. Well-designed search tools can excel at this purpose. The teacher may provide (or pass along from publishers) pre-indexed materials, or point students to Internet sites that offer a combination of the right content and search that delivers meaningful, garbage-free, relevant results.
Advanced courses and specific focus
As the student progresses in a discipline, the needs change. Basic terms become familiar; they relate to one another and fit in with the student's overall understanding of the world. A framework of ideas is in place to support more focused, in-depth learning.
Visualize learning tools that can be used to gather relevant paragraphs and articles, while progressively filtering out material that does not contribute to the current learning objective. The student initiates a search, whether on desktop from content already acquired, or from the Internet. Results of a search are returned, not merely as words on a screen, but as a mini-index (perhaps the 500 most relevant paragraphs). Indexes can be combined, searched, re-searched, to produce very specific indexes that focus very directly on the current topic within the course. [Recall that an index is fully readable as well as searchable.]
The power of collaborative learning
There may be a place for policing student participation in early education, but it sends an unfortunate message -- that the teacher is the student's adversary. Policing at the higher levels simply doesn't work. How can the teacher get the student's mind engaged in the learning process? One technique is to tap into peer influence as an instrument. (Yes, there really is such a thing as positive peer pressure. There are always a few in the group who want something more than flipping hamburgers or pumping gas for a lifetime. They will push the others in the direction of learning.)
At introductory levels, collaborative learning is nicely described by an old (Princeton?) adage: "What we don't understand, we explain to one another." This process is messy; there need to be frequent interventions from the teacher to keep things on track. At more advanced levels, the students take on more initiative; the teacher can relax a bit and enjoy the students' enjoyment of discovery.
Search tools are especially pertinent to collaborative learning. "Hey, guys, look what I found!" When the tools enable extracting focused indexes, they are particularly powerful. Students will search individually from their particular perspectives. The group, or small sub-groups, of students can then combine their findings and progressively refine them. Sharing is part of the youth culture. Applied to education, collaborative data collection combined with meaningful precision search add up to learning par excellence.
Word tools
Pictures help. But ideas sooner or later have to be expressed as words if they are to be shared across generations. How may we get a quick overview of the language associated with a field of learning? Search tools again are relevant. It is a rather easy task to generate vocabulary lists from computer indexes. A vocabulary list is simply a selection of the words and phrases that are used out of proportion to their frequency in more general collections of text data. We tried this in a course in September 2006 at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. We took 48 course-related web pages from the Internet, indexed them, and printed out from the index a list of the words used in those Internet pages. When put in order of highest to lowest frequency, the top 167 words included 50 that were particularly relevant to the course. Together, those 50 words amounted to an overview of the course.
Copyright and private sharing
Have you ever as a teacher used news articles as a major resource? They can be used to demonstrate relevance of the course to the world we live in. Articles can also demonstrate application of principles to the contemporary world.
This raises the issue of copyright.
Copyright law differs from one country to the next. In the United States, some leeway was given to distribution of copyrighted materials for purely educational purposes. See the provisions on educational fair use under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. The law hasn't stood still; the teacher has to keep up to date on the law, and ensure that any distribution that does take place is restricted to the current students.
If learning tools can make access to particular sets of data secure and time limited, that will be an advantage for teachers who are trying to stay within copyright law.
Dependable access
"The dog ate my homework." "My grandmother is seriously ill and I need to go home for a week." "The Internet was down last night."
For at least the last excuse, there is a solution. Provide students with indexes or let them build their own indexes using their personal computer, without permanent reliance on the Internet. The same applies to the teacher's presentations in class. Do you want your lesson plan to be vulnerable to some unthinking person in Pittsburgh operating a back hoe right over a buried main Internet trunk cable? Get the index onto your laptop, and take that to class. It's all in having the right tools!
The teacher's needs
Take the note on the student page about time pressure, raise it to the power N, and you have something approaching what it is like to teach. Your school is very likely offloading administrative tasks onto teachers; on top of that, the budget gets tighter each year. The pressure cooker is on, and you are in it.
As for students, these needs argue for simplicity, ease of use, and low cost in tools to be made available by the teacher to students.
Seeing patterns
Your task is in part to confront students with appropriate content, and to shape their learning experiences. You want them to be able to see patterns and make connections between what they already know and that which is new. You are engaging student minds. You are trying to stimulate interest.
Having the right tools helps.
Your feedback
If you are a an educator, your comments on this page would be welcomed.
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