Promoting Digital Literacies: The Barbara Stripling Model

Barbara Stripling begins her article with a definition of “digital literacy” by discussing that there are many different definitions for it, but no matter which definition you use, it involves a student being able to gather digital information and make sense of that information (Stripling, 2010, p. 16).  For students today, there is such an inundation of information that bombards them from the minute they log onto a computer.  Students need to be able to decipher the “junk” from the relevant information, factual investigations, and legitimate sources.  And while Stripling’s article describes six distinct phases of inquiry, she describes the inquiry process as being “recursive and cyclical, with learners going back and forth between the phases of inquiry to resolve new questions and complexities as they arise” (Stripling, 2010, pg. 16). 

As a science teacher, I was naturally drawn to the “investigate” phase.  My collaborative group has chosen a life science SOL for our project, and its main focuses (food webs, food chains, interactions between species) cover many different areas of life science.  Sourcing, one of the areas of investigation, is an important topic that my students don’t typically consider when using the internet for research.  They see a slick website with “science” words and catchy graphics and assume that it is a legitimate source.  Stripling points out that “the criteria for evaluating digital sources include authority, purpose, currency, credibility, and perspective” (Stripling, 2010, pg. 18).  My group will be working to create a list of resources that give students access to credible sources all located in one place. 

Another part of the investigative phase is connected meaning.  It’s difficult for students to find the connections between all of the information they are digesting from the internet.  I hope to create different groups of resources that will help my students make those connections between the material, such as cultivating resources that show interactive simulations of food webs in action along with websites that have quiz games on key vocabulary terms, such as producer, consumer, and decomposer.  Until students are old enough to make those connections between the meanings of information, it is our job to help bridge that gap.

Media literacy is another crucial part of the investigative phase.  “Media literacy, the ability to ‘read” and interpret information presented in visual and oral formats, must be nurtured and taught explicitly” (Stripling, 2010, pg. 19).  As a middle school teacher, I often see that my students haven’t developed the ability to scrutinize websites for superficial information.  I use a fun assignment for my students where I have them look up an online article about Velcro crops and how they are dying out.  The website has lots of slick data tables and graphs and explains that the “loop” crops aren’t keeping up with production like the “hook” crops and soon, the world will face a Velcro shortage.  The students have a worksheet and have to answer all sorts of questions from the information on the website.  It usually takes a while, but eventually a student will look up from the laptop and ask if the article is real.  They will make comments like “I didn’t know we grow Velcro!” and a savvy student who has caught on early will respond with “We don’t!  She’s tricking us with this article!”  And then we have a great discussion on how websites can look legitimate and students will have to dig deeper to find reputable resources.

I plan on incorporating this part of the phase into our curation project by finding the legitimate sites for my students and collecting them in one place.  I want my students to be able to use the curation project to find a plentiful list of resources that have already been scrutinized by professionals (the members of my group). 

Stripling, B. (2010).  Teaching students to think in the digital environment:  Digital literacy and digital inquiry, School Library Monthly 26 (8), 16-19.

Where's the Librarian? Discussion Post

Richard Baraniuk’s TED Talk was very revolutionary for a speech given in 2006.  The idea of open-source is not new, but has not seemed to apply to K-12 school levels until very recently.  Because of the graduate classes I have taken in library science, I now see the librarian as the center of the informational storm swirling around a school.  The librarian has the education and knowledge to decipher accurate information from the millions and millions of webpages on every topic known to man—they truly are the “quality control” for the school.  With open source education comes the fact that anyone—and they mean anyone—can contribute information to the masses, and some of this information can be hurtful, incorrect, or damaging.  Teachers have long trusted their printed textbooks to relay information to their students, and the idea of creating textbooks that are tailored to specific students in terms of language and educational level can be a daunting proposition.  This is a perfect example of where a librarian can be the “person of reason”.  The librarian probably has the most knowledge of open source in the first place, and he or she can provide accurate information to the teachers so that teachers know how to use the sources productively.  It doesn’t matter how amazing a source is for students if the teachers don’t know how to use it or refuse to use it.

As a science teacher who is using ten year old textbooks, I can tell you that my books are out of date the minute they are published.  So many new scientific discoveries are made every year that the textbook cannot keep up with the information and no school district can afford to replace their textbooks yearly.  Open-source textbooks would help eliminate that lag time in scientific information.  A science teacher could choose to use a new textbook every year, provide several different sources to her students, or choose to not use a textbook at all.  My colleagues and I rely more on current scientific articles and websites to find current information for our students than the textbook.  In fact, I rarely use the textbook other than as a resource for basic background information.