Searching on the Internet and Evaluating What You Find

Posted on 15 December 2011 by Matt Lavery

This blog post is designed for the Westside Warriors in Ms. Ferguson’s AVID classes.

The internet is supposed to give you access to everything, right?  The world’s greatest information resource is at your fingertips and anything you could ever want to know is just a couple of keystrokes and clicks away!  The problem is that everything you never wanted to know is there, too.

Imagine that I told you that there was an extremely valuable diamond that was accidentally thrown away in New York City this year.  It could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it’s all yours.  All you have to do is go get it out of the landfill!

Most of you will probably not start digging through the trash in the various landfills that serve New York.  You would have to dig through a lot of worthless garbage, and get pretty dirty and gross in the process, before you found anything worth while… and you may never find what you were looking for!

The internet is exactly like that.  It has lots of really great sites, and a lot of garbage, too.  In come various search engines to the rescue!  Whether you use Yahoo!, Bing, Yippy, or Google, you can find an awful lot of help finding something good in the vast expanse of information that’s out there.  But none of these search engines is an easy answer to your problem… because there is is one really important thing to remember:  There may be lots of easy answers, but the best answers and the correct answers are almost never easy!

First, let’s look at what those search engines don’t tell you.  Eli Pariser has done a great deal of research into what he calls the “filter bubble.”  His talk at the 2011 TED Conference explains how Google doesn’t give you all the answers.  To get the answers you want out of a search engine like Google, you have to search smart!

When you run a search, your goal is to find the document that will answer your questions accurately.  To do this, DO NOT just type in your questions!

Search engines find the words that you search for on the webpages that it has seen.  If you search with a question, you’ll find pages that have questions.  Those pages may not have any answers.  People with questions go to these question and answer (Q&A) sites, and the answers there are frequently written by them.  I don’t know about you, but I want my answers from people with answers, not people with questions.  Recently, one researcher evaluated these Q&A sites and found that they’re really not all that accurate (Fichman, 2011).

Think about how someone might answer your question.  What would they say?  What keywords will they use when they start telling you about that topic?  See, to come up with that kind of search, you already need to know something about your topic.  How do you search for the important keywords if you have no idea what the important keywords are?

This is the kind of thing that Wikipedia is perfect for!  Find the wiki entry for your topic or subject and read through it carefully.  Wikipedia is NOT your best resource, but it can be really useful as your first resource.  It can help you in three key ways:

  1. It gives you a good overview of your topic:  Wiki may not be 100% complete, and it may not be 100% accurate, but it can give you the background that you need to make sense of other resources.
  2. It helps you find the right keywords to search for:  In the Wikipedia article on your topic, you will see subject headings, important names, special terminology, and all sorts of important words to help you run better searches later.
  3. It has resources you can use, too:  The References, Bibliography, and External Links can lead you to other great resources that you can use in your own research.

Now that you have a decent background and some good keywords, you can run better searches.  Let’s look at some tips on running searches.  Here’s Google’s basic search help, and some more advanced techniques.

When you find a source, don’t just automatically believe it!!  It’s really easy to put things up on the internet.  You know me.  I’m just a guy that volunteers at your school, but I put this whole webpage up just last night!  Just because you found it on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s worth citing in your research.  To decide if your source is credible, use the acronym SEARCH.

  • Consider the Source:  You tell a lot about a website by looking at its domain name and the person or organization that hosts it.
  • Evaluate the Evidence:  What evidence does the site give to support its position or to back up its explanation of things?  How well does your site’s evidence or explanations fit with what you already know?
  • Consider the Author’s purpose:  Everyone has a reason that they say the things that they say.  Is the author of your site trying to sell something?  To be funny?  To get people to read their site so that they can run ads in the sidebar?  To educate?  What are they trying to accomplish?
  • Check the site’s Resources:  All good research cites other reputable sources.  Does the site you’ve found provide its resources?  Are those resources any good?
  • Is the site Corroborated?:  If your site is accurate and trustworthy, they will not be the only site out there that provides that information.  If multiple reputable sites say the same thing, you can have more trust in that information.
  • Ask for Help:  Teachers and librarians are here to help you succeed.  I’m in the 23rd grade, and I still ask my librarian to help me find the right resources and check out the sources that my teachers suggest.  Use your library’s web site, and take the suggestions that your teachers and your librarian make.


References:

Fichman, P. (2011). A comparative assessment of answer quality on four question answering sites. Journal of Information Science, 37(5), 476-486. doi: 10.1177/0165551511415584

Pariser, E. (2011, March). Beware online “filter bubbles”. [Video] Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

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Collaboration: The strength of biodiversity comes to the world of ideas

Posted on 5 June 2011 by Matt Lavery

More often than not, we tend to surround ourselves with people who think like we do. It’s almost an innate human predisposition. Unless we consciously try to avoid doing it, people gravitate towards ideas that support our own. We subconsciously seek validation for our beliefs, ideas, and interpretations of reality. We tend to surround ourselves with others that support our way of thinking and give us positive feedback that we are smart, clear thinking people who reach conclusions that are correct and without logical flaws.

I’m not casting aspersions here, mind you. I’m a human, too. I am also really good at this kind of elaborate self deception. Ironically, this kind of homogeneity is dangerous. We can see this principle reflected in the natural world. Strong ecosystems have many different kinds of organisms that each fill different specialized roles.

All this interconnected specialization is what keeps the ecosystem healthy. For one thing, it is much more difficult for a single predator or threat. When a change in environmental conditions or an aggressive microbe destroys one species in a diverse ecosystem, the role that it filled is taken up by several other species that fill a similar function. (On a side note, you might also be interested in Cary Fowler’s take on the threat that our loss of agricultural biodiversity poses to the world food supply in his TED talk.) Not only does strong biodiversity help an ecosystem resist threats, though, it supports ecological growth and innovation. Nature’s answer to change is to draw from the strength of many.

The same phenomenon holds true in the world of ideas, too. Good ideas come from the interaction of diverse groups that work toward a common goal or on a common problem. Steven Johnson’s work is an interesting examination of how ideas incubate, concepts crystallize, and strokes of brilliance are born in community. The lesson here: Hang out more frequently with interesting people that don’t think like you.

References:
Johnson, S. (2010, July). Where good ideas come from. [Video] Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html

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Expecting Too Much

Posted on 10 January 2011 by Matt Lavery

I have come to the recent realization that one of the general sources of frustration and anger in our lives is unmet expectation. I experienced this rather early in life, though I’m not certain that I learned it until much later. When I was a young lad, during that period of early childhood that runs together as fragments of nondescript memories that are not completely anchored in continuity or time, my family and I took our first trip to Disney World.

My two older brothers understood the significance of such a trip. They had, no doubt seen a few commercials, talked about the happiest place on earth with their friends, and generally bought in to the hype that was built up for them around this place of unbridled excitement and joy. I, on the other hand, knew that we were taking a family vacation. We had done that before. We’ve gone to the beach, or we’ve gone camping, or we’ve even driven through the mountains and stopped at antique stores and roadside markets. Family vacations were cool, I guess, and my young brain expected no more than that.

My mother told me frequently of our reactions afterward. As she told it, my brothers were rather nonplussed about the whole experience. How can any place, no matter how fantastic, live up to all that hype and such high expectations? “Ehh,” they would say, “It was OK.” I, on the other hand, was blown away. This place was awesome! They had great rides and shows, and characters, and those big gondola things that fly over the park so you can look down from like a thousand feet up, and great food, and all that great stuff from those amazing movies, and… Well, you get the idea. I had gone to Disney World with no expectations. I met everything that Walt and his team of Imagineers designed on its own terms. Though I did so simply because I knew no differently, I let Disney World be what Disney World was and not what I expected it to be. As a result, it amazed me.

The problem, I have come to realize, it that we expect too much. By this, I do not mean that our expectations are too high. When expectations are held, they should be held to a high standard. We should definitely strive for and expect excellence. What I mean is that we expect too often; we hold expectations of too many things and in too many situations, and of virtually everyone we encounter. We are causing ourselves a great deal of disappointment and frustration in the process.

We are better off taking life as it comes and taking people as they are. It’s the bit about people that is often the toughest for us, too. I have heard people say, “It is what it is,” as a way to remind themselves of what they can’t change. “It is what it is,” they will say, and then they either move on to discuss what they will do in light of this reality, or let it go and concentrate on the things in life that they can change.

It makes great sense. Maybe we should expand that notion and start to say more phrases like it. He is who he is. She is who she is. They are who they are. In the end, I am only responsible for the things that I think, say, do, feel, and believe. That’s it.

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Time is like Gasoline

Posted on 27 September 2008 by Matt Lavery

I set up my mail client so that, when I open it, it shows my blog in the message window. My hope was that seeing it on a regular basis would encourage me to make time to write blogginess more frequently. That was about a month ago. In the final analysis, I suppose it worked. I’m writing this now & I don’t really have the time to do so. I just got sick of seeing the post about Hancock for so stinking long.

I kept thinking to myself that there’s not enough time. That’s a lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. There’s plenty of time, we just waste a lot of it. At least, I do. It’s kind of like gasoline. I got an email from my cousin about the gasoline shortage in her area that the recent hurricane caused. What I find remarkable about her tale is that few people seem to be driving less. In fact, she told of many people driving more as they take really long trips to get gas.

Sure, maybe we’ve got more carpooling and trip consolidation going on in our nation, but I don’t hear a lot of people saying things like, “Yeah, the yoga lessons were great, but it just doesn’t make sense to keep going accross town twice a week for them, so I quit and got a video instead.” We don’t seem to eliminate any activities, we just gripe about gas prices.

Time is the same way. There’s plenty of time. How much of it gets burned up on TV, or waiting somewhere, or driving to all the remote locations we go. I’m going to have to become more concious of this and fix it in my life. Unfortunately, I have way too much stuff to accomplish today, so to keep myself from getting distracted by stuff in my house and wasting time on it, I’m going to drive accross town to the Dandelion to get some work done.

Having said that, I know I just stepped on a linguistic land mine. I just can’t tell if it’s the irony land mine, the hypocrisy land mine, or the moot point land mine. Maybe it’s a combination of all three. I guess right now it’s just a question that I’ve noticed. I’ll stay aware of it for a while so I can see the pattern at work. Then maybe I’ll know how, or even if, it can be fixed.

Take care, readers. This moment of internal monologue has been brought to you by the number 5, and the letters Q and X. We would also like to remind our readers to watch for low flying objects and beware the randomosity. Keep your assosciations free and stay out of the box. Thank you.

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An American Movie in China

Posted on 13 July 2008 by Matt Lavery

I went to see Hancock today with 小季 and his fiancé. I was actually kind of surprised to see it advertised outside the theatre because it just came out in the US, too. It was simultaneously released in both countries, which I knew happened, I just didn’t realize it was that common. The next movie in the Mummy series is going to come out before I go home, too. It actually comes out here on July 30, when the US release is scheduled for August 1. It’s called the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (I can’t remember the Chinese name, or I’d tell you that, too). It takes place in China, too, so I’m going to try to see it here in Chinese before I go back to the states. No doubt I will then have to see it again in English, but that’s kind of a cool experience.

Anyway, the cool thing about seeing this film in Chinese is that I already had a pretty decent idea what the movie was about and I have a decent amount of background knowledge in that genre of story. I was pretty much able to put my language skills, my background knowledge, and a whole bunch of context together to understand almost everything that happened in that film. In fact, I would say I was at nearly 95% comprehension, despite the colloquial language unlike the stuff I have studies, all the way up until the sudden and unexpected plot twist with the woman. I caught less of that. Twice I had to ask 小季 for clarification. I got the gist of most of the bits concerning her, though.

I still don’t understand the storm, though. If someone could fill me in on that, I’d appreciate it, but it’s not necessary really. I’m going to see it in English, too. I want to see if I understood certain bits of it properly. Oh, and I want to see the business meeting in English, too. I think I got that, but I need clarification.

Posted in ChinaTrip | 2 Comments

很久没见！

Posted on 11 July 2008 by Matt Lavery

Literally, the title means “long time, no see.” Ironically, this is a phrase that we adapted to our language from theirs and, somewhere along the way, lost track of where it came from. What’s even more ironic is this: Almost every time I leave somewhere and say, “再见,” the native speakers of Chinese will reply, “Bye bye.” This is practically universal, so I finally asked 小季 about it. Apparently, the locals don’t just say it to me; they say it to each other. “Bye bye” is currently one of the most common things to say when parting company in China. Depending on the area in question, it may even surpass “再见.”

This begs the question: As I teach an introduction to the Chinese language and culture next year, what do I teach my kids to say when they part company? Am I really going to ask a bunch of students to practice using the Chinese language for an 80 minute block, and then wave and cheerfully say “bye bye” as they leave?

Heh… like anything else, I’ll probably do what I always do: I’ll explain the whole picture, express my preference, and accept either one as a correct response. This means that, even in the states, I’ll probably still say “再见,” and a bunch of people will reply, “Bye bye.”

But I digress. I used that title because it’s been a week since the last blogging, and as much as I have assured myself that I would write more frequently, I have gotten sidetracked by other things. Insert both a shrug and a heavy sigh here, in whichever order you prefer, and we’ll carry on. The reality of it is, that now that I have had gotten into the swing of things here, there’s less “I’ve got to tell you this really great story!” and more reflections on human nature. The nature I’m reflecting on includes my own, by the way. Reflection takes longer than tales, so that stuff will probably come later. Regardless, there are great stories to tell, and I’m sure I will tell them at some point, too. The longish ones may have to wait until I have more time to type them up. For now, I’ll try to toss out little bits like the one I started with today, and call it good. We’ll see how it goes.

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Happy Birthday, USA!

Posted on 3 July 2008 by Matt Lavery

So, in my first week with the kids I’m doing lessons on time and date. We start with things like the days of the week, how to say the date, how to say the time, talking about tomorrow and yesterday and things like that, and then we wrap up by talking about special days and holidays. Now, it was not until I started planning the holiday lesson that it really hit me: Friday is the 4th of July!

This made for an interesting teaching point. I mean, yeah, we can simply call July 4th America’s birthday and that totally works, but I tried to explain that the US was once a part of England, and that we had a war to break away from them and be independent. Suddenly I realized the odd parallels that could easily be made between our historical situation, and current politics is Asia, and I decided it best not to connect those ideas. I did tell them about a student we had at HMS once, though, that didn’t know the US and England had ever had a war because we’re such good allies now. They chuckled, but it might have just been out of politeness.  :)

Anyway, I should say at this point that I am, in fact, still alive and well. I haven’t posted this week for two reasons. The first is that I’ve never planned lessons that teach English as a foreign language. That process has been a bit more time consuming than I had thought. I’m getting the hang of it now, though, and I have started building my mental plan of the overall flow and structure, and then cranking out the individual classes much more efficiently. All told, I think it’s going well, but I might be giving them too much new material each day. 小季 is monitoring that for me, and said not to change my style until after the first week. He’ll get an idea from the students, and then let me know whether to scale it back, step it up, or keep it about the same.

The second reason is that, for my reading class, this is one of those spiffy double-weeks. See, FOR-PD is a reading course designed by the state of Florida as part of the reading endorsement process. It’s designed to be taught over 14 weeks, but the summer semester at UCF is only 12 weeks long. Thus, on two different weeks we have to do two lessons at once, and this is one of those weeks. My hosts have graciously reduced my time commitments this week to help me adjust, but between my reading class and planning my lessons, I’ve been a bit busy.

All told, though, this has been a great experience. My students rock (students always do), and they’re a lot of fun to work with. I’m not sure if it’s cultural, or just the subject matter, but it seems like these students’ facial expressions are much more transparent than my kids in the US. I can totally tell when they are lost or confused, when they know the word they’re looking for but just can’t find it, and when they’ve got the word but they’re just unsure of how to pronounce it. Hopefully we’ll get to know each other better and better as the class progresses.

I think the time and date lessons are a bit tedious for them, but I wanted to do that at the beginning, so that we could practice it throughout the course as part of the Small-Talk that we start class with. Next week’s lessons on sports, hobbies, action words, and describing things should be a bit more active and cool.

Posted in ChinaTrip, My Students | 2 Comments

Job Change

Posted on 30 June 2008 by Matt Lavery

So I had an interesting conversation with my principal the other day. He asked me in an email when I was coming back in a way that gave me the impression that he wanted to discuss something with me. When I told him that I wouldn’t be back until the day before pre-planning starts for next year, he asked if it was feasible for me to call him. I grinned to myself for calling that one accurately and then gave him a ring.

Turns out, he wanted to ask if I’d be willing to teach Social Studies next year, instead of Math. I told him that I’m always willing to make such a change. I never considered myself a math teacher, anyway. I thought of myself as a teacher, who just happens to be teaching math. That might explain what a math teacher was doing working  with the drama department and with History Fair. Well, now the History Fair is a better fit, but helping out with MathCounts might seem a little odd. <shrug>

I am actually kind of excited about this change for a couple of reasons. I’ll be able to work with my students more directly on History Fair, and that program is really cool. Florida’s History Fair program is part of the annual National History Day contest. It’s a really great program, and Horizon has always been very active in it and excelled.  I’m also really excited because I am currently taking a reading course that has gotten me thinking about reading instruction in the content areas. While I was fully prepared to integrate the principles I was learning into a math course, it is a more natural fit in a social studies course.

Not only that, but as a social studies teacher, I’ll get to have a homeroom! I’ve always wanted a homeroom.  :)

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The Joy of Stairs

Posted on 30 June 2008 by Matt Lavery


The Changzhou Apartment

Originally uploaded by mattlavery

I live on the fifth floor. In Chinese, 我住在五层的公寓. In china, though, the ground floor is not numbered. You don’t take stairs to get to the second floor, like you do in the states; you take the stairs to get to the first floor. That means that, every day, I descend five flights of stairs to get out, and climb five flights of stairs to get home. I do this at least once a day, but normally two or three times. I find this particularly interesting because Dad expressed concern when I moved into an apartment on the second floor in Kissimmee (which only involved climbing one set of stairs to get to) after my accident. When I get back to the states, those stairs will be like a little stairway-vacation. I am a little bit winded when I get to my apartment, but not in an “Oh my goodness I’m about to die!” way, just in a “Wow, that’s a lot of stairs,” way. The apartment is cool, though. I posted some pictures of it on Flickr.

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Cabbies

Posted on 26 June 2008 by Matt Lavery

In an effort to reduce the onslaught of huge-ish posts, I may as well periodically toss out my little observations and call it good. This does sort of save me from writing for an hour when I don’t have an hour available. That’s never good, right?

Anyway, the observation of the day seems to be yet another aspect of one of my favorites: “People are people, wherever you go.” When I say it in Chinese, I change it slightly. “世界上，人就是人。” Which, literally translated, means, “On the whole surface of the world, people are just people.” Today’s observation appears to be, “Cabbies are cabbies, wherever you go.”

Twice now, I’ve taken a cab by myself, and been given incorrect change by the cabbie. The meter said 8元 both times. Both times I gave the driver a 10元 note, and both drivers gave me a 1元 coin in return. So there I am, thinking to myself, “What’s that about? It says 8, right there.”

I let it go on both occasions for two reasons. The first, is that 1元 is worth less than 15 cents, and in a culture where tipping is not customary, I’m don’t want to pitch a fit over less than 15 cents, when I would have given a much larger tip than that anywhere else, anyway. I mean, if those drivers want to be the kind of people that crave a dishonestly acquired 15 cents, let them go for it. The laws of sowing and reaping apply here. That’s what I was thinking anyway.

The second reason is that, on my first solo cab ride, the fare was actually 10元, but I only had 8元 and a 100元 note. Since he couldn’t give me the proper change, he graciously accepted the 8元 instead. I figured that between that and the overcharges, balance had been restored in the cabbie universe.

When I took my third solo cab ride, I looked at the meter and said, “8元, right?” He said, “No, 9元,” and pointed to a sticker on the dash that, of course, I couldn’t read without my big ‘ol dictionary. I did notice that it said “1元” on it, though, so I asked my hosts about it later. As it turns out, about six months ago, all cab fares were increased by 1元 because of recent increases in fuel costs. This means that I was not overcharged at all, and thus, instead of having all things balanced in the cabbie universe, I am actually 3元 in the hole. 糟糕!

I never challenged their honesty to their face, but I did question it to myself, and that was just not actually very cool of me. Now I feel a bit like a 屁股. The lesson here, for me, is that people are people, wherever you go. Cabbies are regular people, too. Most of them are decent folk. If my charge seemed wrong once, it could have been intentional. When I got to the second time, I should have realized something was up. People generally deserve the benefit of the doubt, and I should seek clarity and not assume. Sometimes I need reminding; what can I say?

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