Just back from Shanghai in April where she presented a series of keynotes and workshops at the ACAMIS Spring Conference (Concordia International School, Shanghai), Debbie is off again to Istanbul, Turkey (Enka Schools), where she is presenting at the ECIS Librarian’s Conference.
ACAMIS Presentations:
Who Knows What — and How Do I Know It? A Workshop on Evaluation
Young people need evaluation skills in a participatory digital world. Yet, they ditch our checklists and forget our mini-lessons in the dizzying stew of click-and-go wikified information. Well-publicized examples of doctored data and journalistic fabrications remind us that “truth” is complicated. Who is an authority when everyone is an author? How do culture and context impact evaluation? Can technology show us whom to trust? Strategies for students (and teachers) in school and for “real.” The second half is an interactive workshop to explore practical challenges of teaching information evaluation.
No More Cat and Mouse: What Research, Practice and Common Sense Can Tell Us about Teaching Students to Do Honest Academic Work
Are you playing cat-and-mouse with student plagiarists? Do they resist taking notes (“I can remember this stuff word-for-word”), then print out everything – but still forget to attribute quotes or ideas? If students describe research as “smushing stuff” with a bibliography, why wouldn’t they take short cuts? They’ll tell you that Wikipedia is common knowledge and, besides, you just don’t attribute “mashups”anymore. We’ll take a look at what the research says has the greatest impact on student learning, drives motivation, and builds reading comprehension. Then we’ll examine some student work, and identify curricular designs and teaching strategies that will ring true to your students.
Teaching Visual Literacy
Decoders, fluent readers and finally expressive readers and writers – these stages apply to visual literacy as well as to reading print. In an image-drenched world, we’ll consider the “rhetorical situation,” examine some signs and symbols, and see how point of view results from the interaction of the reader, the audience and the medium. We’ll consider some emerging issues, such as visual plagiarism, and practice some reading and teaching strategies, such as determine authority and bias using photographs.
ECIS Presentations:
Cultural Competence and New Authority
We know that cultural competence is critical as our students traverse the global landscape, analyzing, comparing, evaluating and interpreting multiple media from various disciplines and countries. How does culture and context impact students’ evaluation of authority? Does collective evaluation offer insights on whom to trust? We’ll look at ways to develop culturally-literate evaluation skills among our students.
Social Wisdom, Social Ignorance: Critical Thinking and Evaluation in the Age of the Celebrated Crowd
“The opposite of critical thinking is uncritical thinking” (Ira Winn). When we stop thinking, we open ourselves to scams and fraudsters. Hype and spin become the new truth – and everyone’s an expert. Young people need evaluation skills in a participatory digital world. Well-publicized examples of “everyone” as authorities, doctored data and journalistic fabrications remind us that “truth” is complicated. But if it’s taught at all, source evaluation and critical thinking are often presented in a vacuum of artificial situations and hoax web sites which are divorced from our everyday experience or the school curricula. Yet, in their “real” world, students (and teachers) ditch our checklists and forget our mini-lessons in the dizzying stew of click-and-go wikified information. In this highly interactive workshop, we’ll be looking at, discussing, and doing a host of different activities which can be used in lessons on evaluation and critical-thinking. Don’t stop thinking!
