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Deciphering student search behaviour
A new study reveals how students conceal their real search strategies from their tutors. Sarah Bartlett reports
I
s there a learning black market in higher education? This intriguing question emerges from early findings of the JISC- funded Visitors and Residents project[1] which explores learning motivations
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and information-seeking behaviours across education stages.
The project, in which OCLC Research is partnering with the TALL Group at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, J. Murrey Atkins Library, has already made some fascinating discoveries. Students routinely turn to Google and discuss their work with peers on Facebook. Such unorthodox blends of personal online lifestyles with formal learning seem to serve them well.
But according to David White, senior manager of development of the TALL Group (ALT Learning Technologist Team of the Year, 2010), students are nevertheless
nervous about the validity of these practices and conceal them from their tutors. White and his colleagues have noted that students are side-stepping their tutors’ opposition to Wikipedia, for example, by citing articles it references rather than Wikipedia itself. ‘This masks the true scale of these new modes of engagement,’ says White.
White believes that information-seeking behaviours are converging across personal and institutional spheres, as a combined effect of the social web, cloud-based applications and the multi-tab environment. He observes: ‘A lot of the students we interviewed do their research on Wikipedia or syllabus-based websites and have an adjacent tab open on Facebook. They flit between the two, occupying personal and institutional spaces simultaneously, and gather information from outside the institutional context as well as within it.’
Quite often, students will disregard a What are visitors and residents?
The research project is underpinned by an increasingly popular typology, visitors and residents, which was conceptualised by one of the project team, David White of the TALL Group, University of Oxford. ‘I was working on virtual worlds at the time,’ he recalls, ‘when I realised that some people are, in a sense, living online.’ He explains what he means by visitors and residents: ‘Visitors come onto the web to get what they want or need, then come
away again leaving no trace of themselves online, whereas residents live a portion of their lives online and leave a form of their identity on the web. These aren’t fixed identities though – most individuals can switch between these behaviours according to context.’ White is at pains to differentiate the visitors and residents typology from Prensky’s idea of digital natives and immigrants[2] in which age correlates precisely with
,
technological skill-sets. Residents, with their proclivity for living online, could easily be credited with superior technical skills. However, the resident is no more or less competent than the visitor, whose defining characteristic is, in fact, goal-orientation. ‘Visitors critically assess whether a specific platform will solve a problem or move them towards an objective they have set,’ White says.
textbook recommended by their tutor in favour of an online search, the latter being more likely to give a concise and exact answer. ‘Hiding in our data is the perceived importance of effort in teaching and learning,’ says White. ‘If the web can deliver
12 Research Information FEB/MAR 2012
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