Helping Today's Students Becoming Critical Consumers of Online Information
Information Investigator improves information fluency in 3 hours by combining interactive games with live search challenges.
About You
About You
First Name
Carl
Last Name
Heine
Twitter URL
Facebook URL
About Your Organization
Organization Name
21st Century Information Fluency Project
Organization Website
Organization Country
United States, IL, Dupage County
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States, IL, Dupage County
Is your organization a
For‐profit
How long has your organization been operating?
More than 5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Helping Today's Students Becoming Critical Consumers of Online Information
Select the stage that best applies to your solution
Established (you've got demonstrated success)
How long have you been in operation?
Operating for more than 5 years
THE NEED: Describe the need for your solution and the size/dynamic of the community (ies) you will engage
Today’s digital students lack effective strategies and techniques to find information efficiently, evaluate it effectively and use it ethically. These skills are not typically taught in schools. Consequently, colleges devote a large amount of effort to raise students’ research proficiencies. This problem is worldwide and affects virtually every young person who uses the Internet. The 21st Century Information Project addresses this need by creating free and low-cost resources for students in middle schools and high schools, delivered online. In its first years, the Project’s approach was to “train the trainer,” providing free instructional resources and professional development for thousands of educators. One of the persistent problems that schools face is determining where information literacy (we prefer fluency) training belongs. Since class time is such a limited commodity and there is a need for differentiated instruction, we develop flexible, online, self-paced modules for students that may be used individually or by groups during or outside of classroom time.
THE SOLUTION: Please explain what your solution offers and how it is innovative. How will you put your solution into the hands of users or beneficiaries? Be specific!
Information Investigator is an innovative online solution to raising students’ information fluency without the need for additional classroom time or even direct teacher involvement. Three years ago, the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University contacted us to develop self-paced training modules to help students enrolled in their programs become better digital researchers--in particular, enabling them to apply effective evaluation strategies and techniques to be sure the information they find online is relevant and credible. The approach combines authentic performance assessment with interactive, game-like tutorials that target essential information competencies such as browsing, querying, evaluating freshness, authority, external references, identifying bias, fact checking and more. The course takes no more than 3-4 hours to complete. Sessions are saved in a database, so students may move forward at their own pace without losing their work and teachers may monitor their performance and their progress. All the materials are accessible by creating an account on our website (an enrollment key is required). Teachers may assign modules to individuals or groups as part of classroom activities, or as in the case of Northwestern University, have students work outside of class.
THE MODEL: Walk us through a specific example of how your solution makes a difference through use of information technology and media
Last year, approximately 2,000 middle school and high students completed information fluency certification training using this package. Without training, students typically earn 35-45 points out of 100 on an information fluency scale. After training, those scores improve to 60-70, an average gain over 50%. One thing that sets Information Investigator apart from the majority of information literacy assessments available today, is its use of live online search challenges to demonstrate true competencies, eliminating the possibility of guessing (as in the case of true/false and multiple choice items). The game-like interface provides immediate feedback, helping students learn from mistakes and motivating them to complete all the steps. Scaffolding is integrated through the use of just-in-time help modules that provide video explanations and additional examples of applied techniques. A significant component of the assessment design is the creation of a dedicated website (e.g., http://newmedz.com/) that serves as a controlled testing environment for challenges. This alleviates the problem of Internet “drift”, a common problem online that results in broken search challenges whenever information changes or is moved.
THE MARKETPLACE: Who are your peers and competitors? What challenges could these players pose to your success or growth?
Organizations that offer online information literacy assessment include TRAILS, SAILS and November Learning. Moreover, hundreds of colleges have created their own training and assessment packages, an indication that even where the market is the most crowded there is a prevalence of unique rather than universal solutions. The middle school and high school markets remain largely open and while approaches such as TRAILS and SAILS may be found in this space, there is plenty of room for expansion. Authentic performance assessment is what sets Information Investigator apart from all competitors. Our growth depends on reaching large audiences and very affordable
pricing.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
FOUNDING STORY: We want to hear about your “Aha!” moment. Share the story of where and when the founder(s) saw this solution’s potential to change the world.
Any educator who has observed students search online becomes aware that students tend to search superficially (i.e., they tend to take the first hit they find), fail to evaluate the information they take, and sometimes plagiarize what they find. This phenomenon became clear to the project creators when 21st Century Information Fluency was founded in 2001 as a federally-funded (US Dept of Education) research project to study the search practices of students and recommend improvements. In the years since, students are still superficial searchers and the vast majority do not evaluate what they find, primarily because they have not been shown how to
do this. The mission of our project is to provide resources and methods that educators may use to improve the information fluency of their stuents, and more recently, engage students directly in a learn-by-doing online environment.
Specify both the depth and scale of your solution’s social impact to date
Our research shows that with even few hours of focused training, students become significantly better (re)searchers and consumers of information. Searching online is often a solitary pursuit, with learning taking place at the individual level. With guided practice provided by tutorial games and automated feedback, students assimilate techniques and strategies they can use when searching for both academic and personal information. The impact of evaluating information for credibility can have untold benefits. Students learn how to investigate and weigh sources, determine bias, and dig for information using multiple forensic methods. Developing a 21st century mindset about information can change lives and open doors to ideas that are in all reality, just a few keywords away, as well as prevent costly mistakes that result from acting on inaccurate or misleading information. Having this training available in an online, self-paced, and very low cost course can help address a critical gap in the education of most Internet users.
What is your projected impact within the next 1-5 years? Is your idea replicable? If so, how?
We speak directly to Changemakers' interest in helping people better navigate information and ascertain content reliability and authenticity. A database driven self paced course like Information Investigator is designed to scale globally. We hope to reach over 1,000,000 international participants a year. We communicate using our http://21cif.com and http://
facebook.com/informationfluency websites, our blogs and a host of teacher-librarian social networks to connect with people around the globe. Making our services affordable is really the only limitation to our expansion. With greater volume, we will be able to reduce the cost of our services per student.
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve and mark growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
Our six-month milestone is to enrol an additional 2,500 students in our self paced online training course
Six-Month Tasks
Task 1
Use social media to offer free subscriptions to up to 100 educators to evaluate the course
Task 2
Offer free subscriptions to 2-3 influential schools willing to tell others about the effectiveness of our course
Task 3
Add an additional part-time team member to assist with development of new leads, follow-up and sales
Now think bigger! Identify your 12-month impact milestone
8,000 total students enrolled. While this is over a 200% growth rate, it represents only four suburban high schools.
12-Month Tasks
Task 1
Publicize the experiences of participating schools in our newsletters, blogs and at conferences.
Task 2
Hire an external evaluator to research the effects of using the course.
Task 3
Publish the findings from the course: compare what students were able to do before and after instruction.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
1,001 - 10,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
Sustainability
Explain how your company, program, service or product is structured
Business
What barriers have hindered the success of your project to date? How do you plan to overcome these and other challenges as you grow your solution?
One daunting barrier is finding a place in the highly structured school curriculum. Teachers don’t have time to teach information fluency. To break into the school day we created a short and effective online learning experience that assesses and improves user’s information fluency. To get the word out that our performance assessment works we need more effective marketing. We seek to leverage our archive of free resources by sharing them with a global community. Currently we rely on strong organic keyword indexing in Google search results, Facebook, blogs and an online newsletter to generate interest in the project. Keywords: Information Fluency!
How do you see the information-technology and media sectors shifting over the next decade? How will your solution adapt to and/or drive that changing environment?
As it affects our field, information retrieval is moving continually toward ‘user-friendly’ results. This is actually an insidious problem (recently examined in Eli Pariser’s book, the Filter Bubble). Users will increasingly get results defined by their search habits—hence, a narrower and narrower range of results. Investigative search strategies taught in Information Investigator will help users understand and overcome this hard-to-detect effect. We will continue to develop new strategies and techniques to adapt to the changing digital environment.
Failure is not always an option. If your solution fails to gain traction in the next two years, what other applications of the idea could you explore?
Finding the right (affordable) pricing model is the key to the successful expansion of Information Investigator. We already have a network of educators who are interested in using it. If it turns out that there are a large number of interested schools that cannot afford to pay anything for a service like this, we can approach foundations to underwrite their participation. Continuing work in game based learning is also promising.
Expand on your selections, explaining how you will sustain funding
Financial support comes from customers who purchase annual licenses (e.g., Northwestern University) and pay professional development fees. Since we are able to operate without paying salaries, our current customer base sustains and grows the project. Since losing our federal grant in 2007 we have been self-sustaining. No funding has been received from any of the entities listed.
Tell us about your partnerships
We have partnered with the following organizations to deliver programs to their members (or students): Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA), Illinois Computing Educators (ICE), Wisconsin Educational Media and Technology Association (WEMTA), State of Wisconsin Department of Educational Technology, Northwestern University Center for Talent Development, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) and Creekview High School (Canton, GA), among others.
What type of team (staff, volunteers, etc.) will ensure that you achieve the growth milestones identified in the Social Impact section?
21st Century Information Fluency has two business partners who develop and maintain online training, assessment and workshop materials. Carl Heine, Ph.D. has over 30 years experience in curriculum and instruction, assessment design and instructional technology. Dennis O’Connor is a nationally-recognized educator who designs and teaches and manages distance education graduate courses for the University of Wisconsin Stout. We plan to
bring in a seasoned project manager whom we have worked with in the past.
Changemakers is a collaborative and supportive space. Please specify any community resources you would need to grow and sustain your initiative. Select all that apply
Marketing or media.
Specify any resources you might offer to support other initiatives. Select all that apply
Research or information, Collaboration or networking, Innovation or ideas.
Please elaborate on any needs or offers you have mentioned above and/or suggest categories of support that aren’t specified within the list
We would be willing to assist other Changemakers initiatives by conducting research (our specialty) as well as through collaboration and networking. Additionally we have 10 years worth of online curriculum, micro-modules, assessment tools, multimedia enhanced learning objects and a number of specially designed web-based assessment environments we could share with
the community. We give most of our materials away as it is. The bigger the audience we reach the better.
Summary
Define your company, program, service or product in 1-2 short sentences
We help students in grades 6 to 12 search, evaluate and use online information efficiently, effectively and ethically.
Identify what is innovative about your solution in 1-2 short sentences
Information Investigator improves information fluency in 3 hours by combining interactive games with live search challenges.
 | 33 weeks agoCarl Heine said: Here's a link to a prezi that provides an overview of Information Investigator: http://prezi.com/_4uwzwqod1bj/information-investigator-3/ about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 36 weeks agoCarl Heine updated this Competition Entry. |
| 36 weeks agoCarl Heine updated this Competition Entry. |
| 36 weeks agoCarl Heine submitted this idea. |
