Designs for Using Information Julie Hargraves ED 6332 File Format Product Teaching with Technology Designing Opportunities to Learn Priscilla Norton & Karin Wiburg

Today’s Information Environment  Information Explosion More information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5000 years new book titles are published each day. Total of all printed knowledge is doubling every eight years.  Information Overload Information is everywhere. On television, in books, on billboards, in magazines, and newspapers, and the Internet.  Information overload – Information fatigue syndrome.

Educators Challenge  How can learning opportunities be designed that help students search for and locate the information that might be important?  How can learning opportunities be designed that help students learn to sort through, interpret, and judge the information to which they gain access?  How can learning opportunities be designed that help students learn to use information to make decisions, to create order of their experiences, and to arrive at new understanding?  How can learning opportunities be designed that help students communicate the understandings they have shaped from their interactions with information?

Meeting the Challenge: Two Considerations  The Integrated Approach Instruction is tied to real needs. Students learn information problem solving by using real information related to real needs.  The Process Approach Emphasis is on developing transferable cognitive skills that should increase student’s effective use of information in general as well as their use of specific libraries, reference materials, online databases, and Internet sources.

Becoming Information Users - SSCC  To guide the design of opportunities for students to become information users, effective instruction should help students learn to search for information, sort and judge information, and create and communicate ideas and concepts as the result of information use.

SSCC Searching for Information Sorting and Judging Information Creating and Communicating

Searching for Information  Skills associated with effective searching as the ability to develop a broad overview of the topic, to integrate broad concepts by developing a basic understanding of words and related concepts that expand the topic, to locate information providers, to identify information resources and tools, and to search for relevant information. - Books, encyclopedias, Internet, people, CD-ROMS, etc…

Sorting and Judging Information  To be an effective sorter, students must be prepared to judge the validity of the information they have gathered or encountered in the conduct of their lives.  Sorters must learn to cross-reference – to compare television news with newspaper accounts or to compare different authors writing on the same topic.  Once information has been sorted based on its reliability and validity, effective sorters must be able to determine what of the remaining information is important and what is superfluous.

Creating and Communicating  Students must learn to share both raw information and the results of their creating.  They must learn to choose an effective form for presenting information.  They need to learn to provide enough information to make their point without providing so much information that their message becomes obscured.  Ideas and products can be represented by the process of DEAPR (design, encode, assemble, publish, and revise).

DEAPR - Framework  Design - students begin to impose order to information by classifying, grouping, sequencing, connecting, or relating information.  Encode - process of turning thought and experiences into symbolic form.  Assemble - bringing all the information together into a cohesive communication begins.  Publish/Process – communicators publish their work to receive confirmation of their insights, to judge the effectiveness of their communication, and to receive additional ideas and insights that confirm and strengthen or challenge and cause reconsideration.  Revise – taking a small step back and reflect on the cohesiveness, expressiveness, and appropriateness of their ideas, then revisions can be made if needed.