On and on we go

Thanks Obiwankenus for pointing out Kuhlthau's statement "The process maybe more cyclical than the model implies, with stages recurring in a persistent quest for decreased uncertainty and increased understanding" (2004, p. 94). This certainly makes the ISP more user friendly for me. I am definitely back to Kuhlthau et al.'s feeling of being overwhelmed now that I start to try to think about analysing the data and critiquing the Learning Activity. I do, however still feel more at ease with the Callison model. Perhaps by the end of this that will change as I am certainly going to explore further models.

With a view to some initial ideas on critiquing the Learning Activity I thought I would have a look at some evaluation tools or processes that are out there to see if any of them would help organise my thought processes. I want something that will give me a kick off point to structure suggestions for the future etc., once I have analysed the data and seen what it has to say.

Until now I have been unable to get the extra Google features to work on my computer but I have finally got it working and decided to give it a go. I really didn't have time, and to be quite honest the energy and motivation, to deal with the Uni databases today so all I was hoping to get from this was some ideas for a direction in which to head. In short, I was hoping to come up with some ideas that would help me with the optimism of the Selection stage and the sense of direction of the Collection stage of the Kuhlthau et al. ISP.

To my delight it worked fantastically.

I started out with the basic search parameter of 'inquiry learning' which resulted in a wonder wheel full of viable options. I chose to follow a path titled ‘inquiry based learning’ which led me to ‘supported learning’. There were some really good options under both of these. Most of them were from universities or journals so they weren’t rubbish. I then tried ‘guided inquiry’ and got some great results. In particular the wonder wheel ultimately gave me a link to a combined ‘guided enquiry, information literacy’ which yielded some great results. I am a now a firm devotee of Google’s wonder wheel. I have included a screen shot of the 'guided inquiry' wonder wheel but it is a little hard to see without making it truly enormous.

I have included a video of the creator of wonder wheel doing a demo on how to use it for anyone who is interested.

My searching so far, and discussions with fellow teachers in low literacy schools, has confirmed something I always felt was the case but was concerned that it was just a personal opinion with no real theoretical basis. I was also concerned that I was just being negative. However, it has become obvious to me that unless you are teaching a group of students with high information literacy skills inquiry based learning is not going to be successful, unless it is guided/scaffolded and undertaken in conjunction with embedded and additional instruction and learning activities to improve information literacy (Limberg, 2000, pp.193-194). It seems that while you can have information literacy without inquiry learning, you cannot have inquiry learning without information literacy. It should be said, however, that information literacy is greatly improved when it is taught and practiced within an inquiry process rather than as a separate entity (Callison, 2006, p.15; Kuhlthau et al., 2007, pp.77-79).