Cursory Understanding

Piggybacking off yesterday's post about patient problem solving, I stumbled upon a great find. Way back at the start of July the Tempered Radical posted about the death of the Google Wonderwheel, a tool that broke down complex concepts into smaller pieces that are related (and may be part of what you are looking for). In truth, I'd completely forgotten about it during our CBA research this spring. It would have been really fantastic for kids to break down broad issues with complex relationships, or at the very least distill them into more manageable, bite-sized pieces.

The Radical posted about a tool called WikiSummarizer. Essentially you type in search terms, or concepts you are researching, and they are distilled into related topics found via wikipedia. Now it isn't foolproof, but gosh it would have been really helpful. How? Well that brings us back to the notion of patient problem solving.

Say you are one of my students and you have seen a news story on deforestation (maybe a 30 second spot, 60 seconds if you're lucky). You decide that you want to work on the issue of deforestation for your CBA (classroom based assessment). The major premise is that you think it should be stopped because you know that trees are important for the environment-- big bummer that loggers are cutting down the trees ("stop the loggers!"). Where search becomes problematic is that you have a limited knowledge base to draw from in your assessment, yet you are intensely interested in the topic (bike safety? not a big bike rider, not so much. clean drinking water? doesn't seem applicable in our developed area.. etc). Interest is important, but it begins to wear thin when the articles you are trying to decipher are over your head. Patience only goes so far, and certainly can erode even the most interested and patient problem solvers.

Enter the Wikisummarizer, or so I envision. Kids might not necessarily use it first, but it can be in that first tier of resources. After kids start their search, they can refer to the wikisummarizer to help move them along or confirm/refute ideas they have on the topic. Instead of not necessarily knowing what other search terms or steps they could take, they've got another tool to access and move them along. It makes me excited.