Search strategies materials

[PeterHartley]

Maybe involving your learners in the regular exploration and dissemination would be a productive teaching strategy?

This is one of the things that seems to be useful in the Dynamic Learning Maps project at Newcastle which might interest you.

Best wishes

Peter

 

[ElizabethECharl]

Peter – an excellent suggestion and a good way for the learners to be introduced and become familiar with the resource and for me to keep up to date with the content.    I will have a look at the Dynamic Learning Map project.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Elizabeth,

I suspect there is more relevant material on YouTube than you found. In my experience it is very important  when uploading videos to YouTube to make sure the description, title and meta data are done properly and informatively. As there are now lots of universities putting up materials on YouTube to support student learning and research, I would guess there there will be videos on using bibliographic search tools. But not everyone is good at writing metadata and those putting up materials from universities are not to be relied on.

I notice you didn’t use Google. I just did a quick Google search using the search string “YouTube boolean search” and found loads of relevant videos.

The other thing you find now is that creators of video material may have their own websites where, if you know to look there, you can find the resources, but they also put the same videos on YouTube too. In fact, I now do this the other way round. Putting stuff on YouTube is so easy I do this first and then embed the video in my website or in the VLE pages I run.

[ElizabethECharl]

Graham – thank you for raising the vexed and very real issue of the inconsistency of metadata being added to items. For although most people do add tags these tend to vary from item to item.  As I mentioned in my post I was very impressed at the amount of resources that I found on YouTube. Also I know some of my colleagues use these as I have received call out requests for alternative items when a selected item is suddenly no longer available. Regarding using Google in this instance I chose not to use it as I wanted to test the effectiveness of the individual resources’ search mechanism.   At our institution the intention is to encourage all content from staff and in the near future students to be uploaded into a consortia cloud based provision and that will then plug into Moodle.  It is good to know that there is such good quality teaching resources out there.

[James Kerr]

Google is such a powerful “weapon” for searches, but it really is a shotgun approach.  Google Scholar helps narrow to reliable, primary resources, but it still casts a wide net.  To be able to use Google for quality search results, one must possess excellent searching skills, identification skills, and patience.  Younger learners do not always have that mix.

Also frequently forgotten is that Google is not unbiased or completely objective; they are a business, and they do make money by promoting results.  The impact of this will vary based on the content area being searched, but will impact nonetheless.

The advantage of using other OER aggregators is that it effectively takes the first layer of searching and creates a filter through which the results are passed.

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