Shifting Roles In Education

I had several discussions with teachers this week about the role of ClassLinks pages, 21st century learning, and critical thinking. This chart about shifting roles in education and establishing a "wirearchy" is very thought-provoking. You can learn more (and see the chart more clearly) at Harold Jarche's original blog post.

Please look at this (click on it for a sharper image) and think about our role as educators and learners and about our students filling those two roles, also.

Do "student-friendly" search engines make a librarian's job easier?

Sweet Search - A Search Engine for Students

From Sweet Search : This "is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. "
Sweet Search can be used by visiting the site directly or you can embed Sweet Search widgets into your blog or website. I took a look at the librarian selected sites which were excellent. I like the idea of embedding their widgets easily into our Libguides. This sounds great!

But wait a minute,I can't help but feel that there is essentially a big "shortcut" here that could leave long negative long-terms consequences for teaching search strategies.  If we exclusively use these type of tools when are we able to introduce concepts of critical thinking and web site evaluation?

Professor Howard Rheingold has developed a wiki called  Critical Thinking Compendium where there are already dozens of resources linked.


Join this wiki to browse resources and contribute some of your own.  Here's a sampling:


Here is Howard Rheingold's Diigo feed for the tag "critical thinking"
Hrheingold's Favorite Links on critical_thinking from Diigo

• Critical Thinking
• EduDemic » A Fascinating Night With Howard Rheingold & 117 Critical Thinkers
• Critical thinking In the classroom
• YouTube - Critical Thinking: A Reasoning Experience
• YouTube - Critical Thinking and the Basic Elements of Thought
• This Side of the Pond | News Talk: How To Be A Language Savvy News Consumer
• Critical Thinking On The Web
• Argument Mapping
• Half an Hour: An Operating System for the Mind
• Intute - Training - Encouraging Critical Thinking Online

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Here is Howard Rheingold's Diigo feed for the tag "crap detection"
Hrheingold's Favorite Links on crap_detection from Diigo

• Website Credibility Determined by the Search Route » Spotlight
• Open Thinking Wiki
• EduDemic » A Fascinating Night With Howard Rheingold & 117 Critical Thinkers
• US record labels starts fake "citizen's group" to support Canada's DMCA - Boing Boing
• This Side of the Pond | News Talk: How To Be A Language Savvy News Consumer
• Gulf oil spill: To control message, BP buys search terms from Google - CSMonitor.com
• Twitter Journalism » Vetting Twitter Sources
• When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent
• On Wikipedia: Dr. Handel or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wikipedia
• Ideas Project

Don't get me wrong, I think I will definitely be using some Sweet Search widgets in the future.  But we cannot afford to outsource our role as teachers of digital literacy.