Expert Searching with social media

In this post I am trawling through various Social Media platforms looking for content curated and presented by others dealing with Inquiry Learning.

Twitter search journey by author 

Searching with Twitter

I generally use different Social Media platforms for professional and private conversations if I have a choice. Twitter is generally me as a Teacher-librarian or as a cerebral person, not the day-to-day banal musings I save for my Facebook profile. I started my search of twitter with #inquirylearning and found a few interesting things but it didn't appear to be a used tag. I then tried #inquiry-based and noticed a lot of entries coming up tagged simply as #inquiry. I had resisted using #inquiry from the start as I figured it would yield political results about the government inquires being held systematically throughout the country, but I was wrong.  

screenshot of Kath Murdoch's
Twitter profile by author

A name I had seen before, many times in this enquiry, popped up. Kath Murdoch's twitter feed is quite prolific and she has put a lot of work into sharing great inquiry learning tips and articles with the global community, it is a must read for all teachers.

Searching with G+

Like Twitter, I tend to use Google+ for professional networks and learning (stay tuned for Australian School Library Book Chat Community hopefully going live next year which I will be moderating with fellow QUT TL Faith Hage). Searching simply Inquiry on G+ wasn't very fruitful and instead Inquiry Learning produced some interesting communities and individuals. Below are some of the communities I've uncovered using the Inquiry Learning search on G+.

screenshot by author

Searching with Pinterest

As a visual person I really love the ability to curate images, it gets addictive. I keep a variety of work-related and personal Pinterest boards, but I'd never searched with Pinterest before. I really loved that the search function give you the ability to refine you search with pre-determined areas (like a controlled vocabulary), it gives you a heads up that you will find something. My Inquiry Learning board is a curation of interesting pins I have found and re-pinned for future use.

screen shot of Pinterest's search function by author

I'm leaving my Social Media search there as I have an aversion to using Facebook for anything meaningful - even professionals need an unprofessional outlet. YouTube is another great place to find curations on Inquiry Learning although the click-bait is at times overwhelming and you'll find that 'quick search' has turned into hours of video watching fun! I'm using Scoop It! in my next post on content curation, where there are also many Inquiry Learning boards available.  

Follow Dread Pirate Librarian's board Inquiry Learning on Pinterest.

Expert Searching with ProQuest education

Moving on to my last database search in this series of Expert Searching posts I explore ProQuest, an American based International database. Using an advanced command line search in ProQuest's education database I was able to target my search terms to specific fields within the results. While some papers are aptly named, many do not use the terms I am searching in the title. Searching the abstract (AB) specifically allowed me to return results were more targeted and not results where my terms are coincidentally mentioned in the full text.

As the Scientific Method is basically the epitome of inquiry and is, at my school, practised heavily across the 7-12 Science curriculum I have decided to remove science from my search string to allow other disciplines to show up. Choosing to limit the publication date to within this century (2001 - present) will also bring me more usable results as use I.T. and Web 2.0 technologies feature heavily within my school and any viable framework will need to take these into account.

screenshot of ProQuest search by author

The 14 results retrieved from the search above (listed here in pdf format using ProQuest's handy export function) were helpful as they made me take stock of what I was actually looking for. My searches have been rather broad, as are my guiding questions. I am still trying to find an angle to approach Inquiry Learning from. My aim in this searching has evolved to locate resources that will help me approach teachers during curriculum development as say... 

'Hey have you heard about this? I've just read an awesome paper about a Inquiry project that I can see working in your class on [insert topic here]. Would you like to read it? If you're interested I could help you run something similar.'  

So with my mind a little clearer I chose to dive back into the inquiry cycle and re-trace previous clicks back through Google Scholar. Using my new search string (basically just omitting Science) and gather some useful information to help me help others in my school going forward with Inquiry units.

screenshot by author

Check out my Scoop.it curation board on "Inquiry across the curriculum" to see some of the great resources I've found so far. Below is one such example, a nice model called the Spiral of Inquiry (Timperley, Kaser & Halbert. 2014) which nicely illustrates my travels thus far, what has felt like being on a metaphorical möbius strip. 

Spiral of Inquiry (Timperley, Kaser & Halbert. 2014)

I have felt that I have spent a lot of time back and forward between the scanning, developing a hunch and learning phases... on second thoughts my journey is probably better represented by my fancy spiral hair tie - like a loop of telephone cord or DNA... lots of mini repeating cycles which can easily get tangled up along the way! 

My fancy spiral hair tie/ Inquiry Journey (E. Crampton, 2015)

Join me next time in my last post on Expert Searching post looking at Social Media.

Expert Searching with A+ Education database

Powering on with my search to identify models of Inquiry Learning and the 'ultimate' model for my school context (if one even even exists) I find myself at the trust-worthy Queensland University of Technology Library catalogue*. 

*Don't worry if you don't have access to a well resourced university library database collection, many local libraries will have access to these for members. The State Library of Victoria allows Victorians to sign-up for membership online giving them access to a range of databases and other digital content, check out your own state library for a similar deal. 

One such database is A+ Education, an Australian online collection of full text articles from more than 130 Australasian journals dealing with education specific topics. Picking up where we left google scholar in my last foray into searching I re-cycle some of my search terms (replacing "secondary school" with "secondary education") and take into account A+ Education's search tips. 

screenshot of A+ Education database via informit by author

The search string above is basic ("inquiry learning" AND secondary education AND framework") and yielded only 12 results which is a highly manageable number. The quality of the returned results and my broad inquiry (being non specific to a particular discipline) meant that I didn't need to get more creative with my search technique. 

Further steps for this search could have incorporated the use of truncation in the term inquiry (as *nquiry) to pull up results containing enquiry; wildcard terms such as educat? to search variants of education such as educator, educate or educating; or the proximity operator % between inquiry and learning (inquiry % learning) to indicate that the terms need to be adjacent but in no particular order.

This search has left me with interesting resources to read, adding to my overall understanding of Inquiry Learning... a pastiche of ideas that I now need to reconcile into a coherent thought process. These resources will come together in a later post outlining content curation for your reading pleasure. The term "democratic learning" is featured within one of my results, Hooley's New structures to support democratic learning, and is a term I'd never heard before. Defaulting back to Google search I plugged in the search string "democratic learning" AND inquiry and came across a nice overview of the democratic learning process and an interesting article: Child-centred inquiry learning: How mathematics understanding emerges  by Calder & Brough, featured in the International Journal for Mathematics Teaching and Learning (2013). 

The following quotes stuck out for me in this paper as I feel it wholly reflects why Inquiry Learning frameworks and tasks may not be utilised to their full potential within schools.

"Authentic tasks reflect the nature of real problems because they are complex, ill structured, contain multiple perspectives and offer multiple pathways or solutions" (Young, 1993). In addition, the nature of inquiries involves many skills that are not measurable through standardised tests such as the ability to negotiate, create knowledge, think creatively and critically, and work together for the common good." (Calder & Brough,  2013)

Further questions arising from this search:

• What is democratic learning?
• Is Inquiry Learning democratic at its' heart?

Expert Searching with Google and Google Scholar

The first port of call (and often last) in most web searching journeys is the famed Google. In the school library where I occasionally work I often see, to my dismay, students typing their whole research question in the ever obliging Google search bar. In order to really see the benefit of applying expert searching techniques to Google (we’ll look at Google scholar later on in the post) I thought I’d start at the same point as so many of my students (and unfortunately some colleagues) by asking Google a question as if it were a sentient being.

Dear Google,

There were some pretty impressive results from the search above, however if I had solely relied on this method though I would have 142 000 000 results to sift through - take note that in my experience many students stop here, usually after the top three or four results. That is equivalent to 0.000003% of what is available! In a bid to refine these numbers decided to target the key words of my question to make a search string.

With the help of Google’s Search operators and the Youtube video Search smarter, Search faster on The University of Sydney’s YouTube channel (shout out to the ever so generous Tony Szymkowski, a fellow QUT TL student, for sharing this) I was inspired to make full use of Boolean operators AND and OR. 

So looking at my question, "What are the various models of Inquiry Learning and how do they differ?”, I decided to isolate the key words and assign alternate words to use the OR operator with.

Question terms	Inquiry	Learning	Models	Differ
Search Term	inquiry	learning	model	difference
Synonyms/ alternate words	project-based	education	framework	comparison

Take two. 

 ("inquiry Learning" OR "project-based") AND (model OR framework) AND (comparison OR difference) 

A lot less results this time but by including “Project-based” I gathered a whole lot of information examining it’s difference to Problem-based learning - obviously a question which gets asked and answered a lot on the web. But this doesn’t seem to suit the direction of my intended search. So I try again omitting "Project-based".

Take three.

At each step so far using Google I have been able to refine my results. Google also seemed to recognise that I am keen to find quality information and automatically offered Google Scholar articles when I started using the Boolean operators. To be sure this was the case I tried searching 'Inquiry Leaning Models' and '“Inquiry Learning” AND models’, and sure enough Scholar turned up second time around. So, taking the bait, at this point I abandoned asking Google any further questions and switched its more academic sibling Google Scholar. Google Scholar searches scholarly articles and literature in the same way Google searches everything else.

Scholar has delivered me a lot of articles, but significantly less that Google produced. I’m happy with this number, I am not going to refine further using words however I did remove citations later (reducing the hits to 12 700) and tightened the date range to the last 5 years (further reducing hits to 7 950). As I am across the curriculum I don’t have a subject area to further reduce results by, my search is still broad in that aspect. Lastly I add AND ("secondary school" OR "High school”) to my search and retrieve 4 810 results, and I’m spent. I’ll go through this list, until I find some specific models to compare. 

During my first Google Scholar search as I was Scrolling through the list of results I stumbled upon a citation in the results. As searching is rarely linear, I started following breadcrumbs (links) that led me off the path I had set myself on. 

I was intrigued by this listing as it wasn’t a live link… a challenge! I searched for this book on QUT’s Library database, and sadly confirmed my fear that it was indeed a real life “book” and being based in Melbourne I couldn’t just stroll up to the Queensland University of Technology to peruse its pages. Instead of searching local libraries for the book I continued to scroll my database results list - I mean I am interested to see what it says, but the path of least resistance is just re-searching the resources digitally available. And further down the list I found an interesting sounding ebook listed in all it's digital glory - Collaborative models for librarian and teacher partnerships. Why am I bothering to tell you all this? Well reading through the chapter titles in this book I came across this Chapter 11 “Need to Know”: Partnerships in Project-Based Learning by Rhonda Huisman. And it’s the abstract for this chapter that got me excited, indulge me please. 

“ABSTRACT - This chapter outlines, defines, and illustrates examples of project-based learning, while focusing on how librarians can offer support to teachers when creating and leading project-based learning programs. Various disciplines and grade level (K-12 and higher education) examples of projects are discussed, pointing to strategic methods of intervention from school librarians, as well as ideas on how to collaborate and build relationships through project-based learning opportunities.” (Huisman, 2014) 

If you’ll recall my last inquiry question from my initial post "How can a Teacher-librarian best support staff to integrate Inquiry Learning into their curriculum in a gentle yet effective way?”… A-Ha! Although I’ve still not answered my first two questions, this 'search tangent’ I’ve gotten myself onto has brought me closer to my inquiry goals.

Join me in my next posts when I get to searching the academic databases A+ Education and ProQuest Education looking for examples of the various models of Inquiry Learning available and hopefully find the best fit for my inner- west Melbourne secondary college.

All the images within this post are screenshots, taken by me, of Google and Google Scholar search interfaces.