Yeah!
So, I’m talking about one of the keys in Hairston’s article, my previous entry. One of the keys was to teach strategies for discovery, to let students generate content. I do this often, with various degrees of success.
I will use a search engine and type something, usually springing from the dreaded Wikipedia. I use it as a point of reference, branching out to research and follow the leads the articles give me. But Wikipedia is a disease!! I mean, I want to research something about William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, and end up reading something about the Japanese samurai code of honor, Bushido, in something like four clicks of the mouse.
And if you’re remotely like me, with the attention-span of squirrel on crack, then you’ll spend a lot of time doing inane, irrelevant research to the topic at hand. But I have found that this free-form research, once I can tighten it down to just click on the terms related to my task, is actually very helpful, especially if I’m stuck, because I can see information related to the topic.
And because I am an ironclad, certified-to-win-at-least-$500-dollars contestant on Jeopardy!
