The final week of the teacher education program is upon us at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education — and it is punctuated by a two-day series of professional learning seminars for teacher education candidates. I’ll be presenting to a group of students today on online inquiry. My presentation brings together some of my current thinking and understanding on this issue. The presentation starts by framing the importance of online inquiry for today’s learners. It provides a few facts to frame our thinking about the complexities of the digital literacies landscapes our learners must navigate. It offers some research on the strategies that expert online readers and researchers use as they construct an integrated understanding of a topic using multiple information sources. It provides some information on teaching methods that have been shown to support, at least in part, the development of fundamental online inquiry strategies.
Most importantly, I hope the session prompts students to generate their questions about digital literacies, and gets them thinking critically about how to support digital literacies learning through their own teaching practices.
Here is the link to the presentation: http://bit.ly/onlineinquiry