Important Ed Tech Book Reviews
From Now On
|
|
Vol 11|No 5|February|2002 | |
Please feel free to e-mail this article to a friend, a principal, a parent, a colleague, a teacher librarian, a college professor, a poet, a magician, a vendor, an artist, a juggler, a student, a news reporter or anyone you think might enjoy it. Other transmissions not permitted (see copyright below).
Inference is detective work - seeking clues, resolving mysteries, figuring out whodunit. The Internet is a great source of certain kinds of data and primary sources - images, diaries, text files of various kinds. Meanings are implicit rather than explicit. The student must develop insight rather than uncover it. But teaching this skill requires more than repeated practice. It is not enough to send students to an online museum and ask them to come up with new titles for paintings. Teaching such skills requires the introduction of the thinking strategies that combine to enable students to extract meanings and to construct meanings when the raw ingredients are present but the actual meaning is not self evident, followed by modeling and guided practice. The following page lists ten types of inference drawn from Johnson and Johnson (1986) http://www.d46.k12.il.us/curriculum/literacylearningi.htm#inference
The Exploratorium in San Francisco has collected excellent resources to assist with this kind of learning: http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/workshops/artofquestioning.html http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/index.html The Net provides many rich data sources to support this kind of thinking and learning as is amply described in "No Free Lunch on the Internet" - an article published in the January issue of FNO. http://fno.org/jan2000/freelunch.html
|
Photography by Jamie McKenzie |