Introduction: 23 Things To Do in the Spirit of Inquiry!

MA State Science & Engineering Fair website

The 23 Things program is based on an online discovery program (originally called Learning 2.0) created by Helene Blowers, former Technology Services Director at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County in North Carolina.  Since its creation in 2006, the 23 Things program has been replicated by more than 750 libraries and in at least 15 different languages.  The program is intended to be self-directed and self-paced and to encourage discovery and exploration, and as such, seemed the perfect template for students at Spring Hill College to practice various library skills and research methods, and to embark upon the Spirit of Inquiry that we (the faculty and librarians at SHC) hope will guide the rest of your learning for life.      

Here's how it works:

• During the freshman course of study, and likely in conjunction with at least one of your English or History classes, you will work through the 23 Things in the Spirit of Inquiry, Level 1 program housed online at http://spiritofinquiry1.blogspot.com/.  A new unit will be released on Friday of each week.    
• You will work mostly at your own pace, but sometimes the Inquiry Exercises at the end of each unit will need to be completed before a librarian visits your class.  Your instructor will inform you of any deadlines or due dates, and also if and when you will get a grade for your efforts.
• Each unit will consist of an introduction to the topic, a list of Things To Know, and several Inquiry Exercises along with a Bonus Exercise for over-achievers.  
• You will complete the exercises in a Survey Monkey online form, and your answers will be reviewed by a librarian and by your instructor NOT so that we can mark them wrong, but so we can shape further instruction and discussion on these various topics.
• You will also have the opportunity to ask questions, get help, and re-do the exercises, if you like, in order to achieve mastery of these skills.  
• Your work on the exercises is not anonymous, but your answers will not be shared with a class or anyone beyond your librarian and your instructor without your consent. 

Are you in?  Let's get started!  Jump to Thing 1.   

Thing 1: So you think you can Google...

Objective of Thing 1: Learn how to make use of the more advanced features of Google to facilitate exploration and discovery.  

Congratulations, you’re a Digital Native! That is, you have never lived in a world without Google. Even those of us who were born before Google can hardly remember what it was like to live without it. We had phone books! And maps! And if we needed information, we had to go to the library and look stuff up in a reference book, or use the card catalog and then find a book on a shelf. Or we had to find an expert—somehow—and ask him or her. Sometimes we just couldn't find the answer at all.  

And then, there was Google.     

Toney Avelar--Bloomberg/Getty Images (for Time.com), April 26, 2016

We can now correctly expect to find the answers we seek, easily and instantly. But what about the "answers" we don’t really know we are seeking? Maybe we want and need just to learn about something, thoroughly and deeply and over time. Can Google do that too?

Why, yes it can! Or at least it can help you get started on a research journey. You just need to know how to use Google in a more advanced way, to move beyond the search box and dive more deeply into what the Internet has to offer.

Things to know: 

• Remember that Google is a search engine, and you can tell it what specific part of the Internet to search. If you type search terms into the usual search box on the Google home page, then you are "telling" the search engine to search the whole Internet (notice that the top of the page says "All") because that is Google's default setting. 

• But chose a narrower option: type your search terms, then at the top of the page, click on News. Now Google is searching only those News stories (newspapers, magazines, broadcast websites) having to do with your search.

• You can also just go to the Google News homepage at https://news.google.com/ (or Google Google News!) and read the day's top stories. The default here is news in the U.S., but you can choose to view many other countries' headlines by using the drop down menu at the top of the page. Along the left hand side of the page, you can choose news in many categories.

• You can create a Google News alert by doing a search with your terms on Google News, then scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking on Create Alert. Then Google will send you an email when the subject of your search appears in the News with links to the relevant stories.

• Take a look too at the Google Advanced Search page at https://www.google.com/advanced_search (or Google Google Advanced Search!) From here you can refine your search results in many ways. One of the most useful is to enter your search terms in any of the boxes in the top part of the page (great tips for which box to use and how on the right hand side of the page) and then narrow your results by site or domain and choose just websites ending in .edu (which means you will get only websites associated with colleges or universities).

Inquiry Exercises: (Go to this Survey Monkey link to record your answers.) 

1. Try your search terms in:

• "Regular" Google
• Google News
• Advanced Google

Choose an interesting result in each search and describe and comment on it briefly. Be sure to copy and paste the link too.

2.  Sign up for a Google News Alert, and choose the most interesting result you get in your first alert to describe and comment on.

3.  From the Google News home page, find a story from one of the many categories (or maybe from another country) that you find particularly interesting.  Describe, comment, provide link. 

Bonus!  What is something you learned during this exercise that you were not specifically directed to learn or try?  Tell us about it!  

0

DONE

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Thing 2: Whither Wikipedia?

Objective of Thing 2: Learn how and when and why to use Wikipedia. 

Let's get this right out there: Wikipedia is a great source of quick information, and mostly accurate. But in the same way that you (or more likely, your grandparents...) would not depend on the World Book Encyclopedia for all of your information needs, you should also not plan to rely on Wikipedia to be your sole or even your main source of knowledge. And Wikipedia should never be quoted from, or cited as a source in a written assignment; it is simply not considered an appropriate resource for college-level work (or for high school level work, for that matter).

However, you can certainly think of Wikipedia as a jumping-off place. Need to know more about the new Prime Minister of the UK?  Or how Pokemon Go works? How about a complete list of "Game of Thrones" episodes with plot summaries? (Wikipedia is especially good at episodes lists.) By all means, take a look. You might find alternate search terms or, at the bottom of a Wikipedia article, further references or external links to other websites to check out.
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contribution_Team/Welcome/Help_out

Things to know:

• Every week, Wikipedia creates a list of its 25 most popular articles, The Top 25 Report, which is really quite interesting.  If 25 isn't quite enough for you, there is also a Top 5000 list. The creator of that list notes that "Certain articles are inherently popular. Others map to cultural phenomena and recent news events. When an "unusual" topic appears prominently, sometimes a recent Google Doodle is to blame."1 That's why they call it the Web, folks!  It's all connected.   
• From any page in Wikipedia, you can click on "What links here" to go to a list of all hyperlinked content in the article. 
• Speaking of hyperlinks, they are the reason a Wikipedia result pops to the top of almost any list of search results; Google's PageRank algorithm prioritizes pages with heavy linking, that is, articles that link to and from lots of other articles. (Again: Web!)  
• Wikipedia's Main Page provides a daily featured article, and sections of "In the news," "Did you know?" and "On this day."  At the top right of the page, you can select from many portals, such as Arts, History, Society, Technology, etc., and go to a page that further subdivides that subject matter and offers features similar to those on the main page. 
• And purely FYI: Wiki means quick or hurry in Hawaiian.  From Credo Reference (a useful online source that we will get to shortly), we learn that Ward Cunningham developed the first such website in 1995 and named it WikiWikiWeb...after the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport." The original website described itself this way: "All Wiki content is work in progress. Most of all, this is a forum where people share ideas! It changes as people come and go."2

The takeaway: Start with Wikipedia and everything it has to offer, but do not stop there.      

Inquiry Exercises (to be completed at this Survey Monkey link):

1. From the Wikipedia Main Page or from one of the portal pages, choose an item of interest to you and skim (or really read, it's up to you) the article on it.  Scroll down to the references at the bottom of the article and click on one that looks good.  (You might have to try a few.) What article did you start with?  What reference did you click on?  Where did it take you? Provide your links for all answers!  

2. Do as you did for number 1, but this time, go to the External Links.  Same deal. 

3. Using SOMETHING that you have learned from working through numbers 1 and 2, go back to one of the tools you used in Thing 1 and search that.  What tool did you use, and what results did you get? 

4. Using that same something or a new something, go to Credo Reference on the Spring Hill College Library's home page (you haven't been told this yet!  You are having to figure it out as you go!) and search there.  Which result was most interesting to you?  

Bonus!  Can you get Credo Reference combined with Easy Bib to help you create a citation for the article you found in number 4?  Use MLA format for now.   

1 West, Andrew G. "Popular Pages." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 17 July 2016. Web. 21 July 2016. 

2 "The Wiki." 100 Ideas That Changed the Web. London: Laurence King, 2014. Credo Reference. 6 May 2015. Web. 21 July 2016.