Maps as tools for thinking

In searching for something else, I found this interesting piece by Atlantic Monthly author James Fallows on maps (which I love - is there such a thing as a cartophile? the little red line under a misspelled word seems to say no) as information and design Fallows is looking at maps and map software tools for thinking. And while at first I was disappointed that the maps he was using were "just" maps of cognition - such as maps of debates and of arguments, to show the lines of thinking - quite fascinating, Fallows ended up with a city map of London which is partly meant to show that a map is easier to follow than written directions -- and yet, there is a skill and an art and a talent in reading cartography, which may be why Google is creating street scenes to supplement their maps.

Learning How to Think

Having a few spare minutes over break - but only a few - I was reading some New York Times opinion pieces, and found Kristof's essay on "Learning How to Think" about the ways people make decisions. And this reminded me of a recent book review of Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide (chapter courtesy of New York Times) reviewed by Steven Johnson. All of this musing on cognition relates to trying to help students think more clearly about their research and writing processes. And this brought me back to a book still on my nightstand, Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett. Here. As our population of international students rises at Oregon State, it's helpful for me to understand how students think and why.

I need more time to think about this. For now it's a stub, as Wikipedia would call it.

Here's a recent puzzle:
If the plural of DOG is DOGS, how can the plural of AMERICAN be AMERICAN'S as we so often get in student papers. Any ideas?

The long (unending) journey with Information Literacy

OK, despite will publicized lists of competencies or proficiencies for Information Literacy - the skills a successful student should have (OSU, ILAGO) I don't think we can ever say that someone "knows everything" just as no one is ever a finished and perfect writer. What we try to do in our composition classes at Oregon State - from the first term and through second terms etc - is to continue to develop and guide the writing habits and ideas students arrive with, and likewise the information literacy habits and beliefs. This is a huge topic (see my friend Anne-Marie's blog), of course. Here's a clue into the challenge we face. In the Sunday March 22 Oregonian, Kimberly Melton writes about the lack of librarians (and even libraries) in Portland public schools. When I read this, it helped make sense of why freshmen arrive thinking they don't need any further instruction in how to find and understand information - because they have been managing (sort of, badly) on their own and have little experience with the excitement of the adventure of exploring the continually expanding info lit frontiers. OK, I'm getting a bit carried away, but you see what I mean. And if "life long learning" is a goal that universities endorse (and they should), then lifelong intellectual curiosity (with the tools to keep going) should be nurtured. How to do this, though, is the challenge.

Thank goodness for Facebook (and spring break)

If it weren't for Facebook I would never get anything posted at all these days - luckily FB does not expect long thoughtful meditations. Short thought bites is all I can manage and all FB wants. So at least folks know I'm still around. Still, I promise more, and now that it's spring break -- which means I can work more leisurely at home preparing syllabi for spring term - updating and recycling last term's "Writing with Style" and the annual spring practicum for grad students on teaching Business Writing, and creating a whole new (to me) course on Critical Reviewing (books, films, food, fashion, art, architecture, etc). All fun of course and all an excellent excuse to read New Yorker, Atlantic, etc. More coming soon.

New Yorker Covers

While searching for the McPhee piece I just posted, I found this link to New Yorker covers. What could be more fun (for me, anyway) than reminiscing about these images. Look at the June 9 & 16 double issue - the owner of the independent bookstore opening for the day looking at the woman next door receiving a delivery from Amazon.com. Isn't it great - and sad! I used to work at an independent bookstore and we could not compete with Amazon's prices, of course.

This link is just 2008, but you can easily see nearly any year. You can also search with this link to the Cartoon.Bank and search as far back as the 1920'2.

Information Literacy - New Yorker style

Good to be back online - and hope I can keep with it for a while. Just read a great article by John McPhee - everything I've read by McPhee is good - in New Yorker (Feb 9) on p. 56 called "Checkpoints" about fact-checking. Sorry that the link doesn't give the whole article - just the abstract, but I really encourage you to find it and read it because this is Information Literacy in a whole new light (and by the way, the abstract includes KEYWORDS! Perfect for our first year comp Info Lit assignment this term) McPhee provides several stories of times when the magazine's fact checkers persisted in finding out the truth about the data he includes. He also gives a funny story of when they changed McPhee's story based on comments by an expert on plate tectonics - Eldridge Moores - who actually had a slip of memory, confusing the Adriatic Plate with the Aegean Plate, thus introducing error where none had existed before. The hero of McPhee's story is Sara Lippincott, now retired, who checked facts for years for The New Yorker.

McPhee also reports on the various fact-checking practices of other magazines (variously rigorous) and book publishers (non-existant - it's up to the author to check facts).

All of this is not only fascinating on its own, but especially in connection with the ways we teach information literacy to students at Oregon State. If anyone else reads the article, I would be very interested in reactions.

A new year two-fer -- now Adam Gopnik

Lately, when I read the New Yorker, I find myself enjoying another of Adam Gopnik's essays. For example, this new one aobut Samuel Johnson "Man of Fetters" which I liked almost as much as his essay on John Stuart Mill which was great.

Apparently Gopnik is so well known that a whole blog about him is available. On the other hand, not everyone is a fan. James Wolcott is less excited. Maybe he's jealous? Or am I just too swayed by Gopnik's prose.

More later.

Welcome 2009 - Books miscellany

Welcome 2009. I was afraid that my blog wouldn't let me back in, after all this time. So here are some items I have been reading this afternoon.

My Google news alert for books brings me: "Reading Serious Books Challenges Your Thinking."
by Mwenda wa Micheni from the African Business Daily which asks a key question:

Do our leaders have time to read serious literature; literature that engages the mind and offers direction? What literature do they read if they do at all, empty pulp literature?

I think we know the answer regarding Obama, Bush, and Palin. But for myself, I know I'm not reading enough books. Mostly articles and student papers. When invited to join "good reads" I feel very much the fifth wheel, as I have nothing to contribute.

On the other hand, from the UK, we have this: "Poor teachers fuelling 'loathing of books' by Graeme Paton:

The poor teaching of English in schools is leading to a "loathing of books" among children, according to" novelist Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black, Strange Meeting and I'm the King of the Castle. Hill claims to be "flooded with "desperate" emails from pupils struggling to understand her novels because they aretaught "so badly, so dully and so mechanically" that many children were being turned off literature altogether.

I'm wondering how applicable this is to the US? Is it always the teacher's fault? What about No Child Left Behind?

How long does it take for Google Reader to update?

I was checking my Google reader and it still hasn't shown the post I made a few minutes ago. Does anyone know how long it takes to update?

Why are keywords so challenging?

Sorry for the long absence. What I wanted to write about - still will - is David Aaronovitch's article from the London Times as found by my students in WR 222. But today I'm writing about keywords and why they are so baffling to students. There is a cognitive challenge here. In all our writing classes we have some information literacy activities that require research and students are surprisingly baffled in their attempts. Yesterday a student said she still had not found any scholarly articles for her essay about the benefits of marching bands (benefits to members or the the school team being cheered on). I said, let's look, opened OSU's Academic Search Premier database, typed in "marching band" and the first two articles were quite helpful. It was so easy. I wondered what key words she might have been using that she couldn't find anything.

Which brings us to our challenge for our campus-wide Information Literacy in first year comp. We are trying to design some new activities that will help teach this concept.

In EBSCO I found an interesting article -

The Effect of Search Engine Keyword Choice and Demographic Features on Internet Searching Success.Preview:

The objective of this project was to determine the effect of keyword choice and demographic features on Internet searching success through empirical research. An experiment was done with 1,109 l...

By: Weideman, Melius; Strümpfer, Corrie. Information Technology & Libraries, Jun2004, Vol. 23 Issue 2, p58-65, 8p; (AN 14078902)
which found that while younger and white students tended to be more successful with keyword searching, in fact students are still overconfident of their ability to find articles.

But here's a look at the opposite side that might just be a way to help students understand. Let's look at the other side - if you are the author, how can you help people find your essay. Scholars typically list keywords with their article abstracts. And web designers want desperately for their sites to be found, so they work hard to make a wide range of key words work for them. Karen Thackston devotes a page to "what are keywords and what the heck do you do with them" to help web site owners/designers know how to help search engines find their page. After all Google's algorithms are based - I think - on keywords.

Lorelle's blog on WordPress also addresses the value of using keywords effectively. Her perspective, like Karen's above, is to help bloggers make their sites more easily reached. If I wanted to capture a lot of attention to this post, I need to use the words both as single "keyword" and two words "key words" because people use them both ways. Wikipedia uses the single keyword, though very minimally. In this case, while normally I eagerly refer students to Wikipedia, I don't know if their entry is helpful.

Kevin Sinclair of Cyberindian also addresses Keywords (one word) again from the perspective of the customer. What we hope to do in our activity is help students induce (not deduce) what would be effective keywords to find a particular text without the author or title - such as Swift's "Modest Proposal" so that students can then devise keywords/ key words that would effectively help them in their own research when they are not looking for a particular item.

What Anne-Marie and Dan and I talked about at the library yesterday was the interesting relationship between key words and tag clouds. Just because a word occurs often doesn't make it a keyword, and I don't mean words such as "they". A tag cloud I made of "Modest Proposal" had as one of the most common words "burden" and then "kingdom" - neither of which I would have thought of to find it. Using "burden" and "kingdom" together as search terms in Google did not retrieve "Modest Proposal" on the first two of the Google result pages. However the key words "Ireland poverty children satire" brought up an entry for Swift as the first on a Google search. It would be interesting to experiment with this.

I'm hoping that this post will attract some thinking. Wish I had a good image for this.

Maybe the real challenge is what DavidWeinberger raises: that Everything is Miscellaneous.

ps: my Blogger appears to have lost the auto spell check.

"Let America be America Again"

A number of friends have recently emailed Langston Hughes' wonderful poem, "Let America Be America Again," which is so inspiring with Barack Obama's election. I just wanted to add to the swelling hearts and share it, too.

As Hughes says:

Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
Let America be America again.
And while it was sadly too often true for Hughes that: "(America never was America to me.)"

Now, I hope, Hughes would find that America could be America for him.