My
Exploration
Research Report: Learning to Become Internet Literate
By Renae Mendez, G18, Spring 2003
Dr. Leon James, Instructor
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leon.html
Instructions for this report are at: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy18/g18research.html
Introduction
Online searches… some people love them, some hate them, and some are simply inexperienced like me. Four months ago I began taking a course that required me to complete online searches and fill out a form as I did so. This form that I began to use so long ago is now the data which is the basis for this report. A table is included later in this report with averages showing how I progressed through the process of changing from a novice searcher to a slightly experienced one. The questions in the form analyzed my affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor skills as they make up my three-fold self as a searcher. The affective fold is the searcher’s moods and feelings before, during, and after a search. The cognitive aspect is the thoughts/opinions, cognitions, and processes of the mind that the searcher uses to interpret the information found while searching and to understand themselves as a searcher. The sensorimotor part includes our actions and physical abilities as we search. These three parts explain how and why we are searchers as we are.
In this report I will also highlight the importance of reviewing the work of previous generations of the online community that I am now a member of due to this internet searching experience. Learning to use the internet is only a small part of what I learned while in this class and writing this report. Reviewing the work of other students and Dr. Leon James showed me that the value of the online community is immeasurable and invaluable when learning a new and complex skill, and you will realize this you read further.
Christine Marchadie explained her experience with learning the internet through a series of stages: frustration, stress, anxiety, and depression. Though each stage had different characteristics and emotions associated with it, her general belief was that she got through it, many other people have too, but we all deal with the experience differently and interpret its meaning and importance in our lives in different ways.
The first stage, Causes of Frustration, was focused on our inability to control or understand the internet.
“difficult
to find particular topics and items”
“it
doesn’t do what you want it to do”
These are two quotes by Cy Yun, generation 3, that were used to explain internet frustration. The internet is not like a person that you can reason with and convince to do what you want. You have to make a proactive effort to understand and navigate it instead of making it understand you, because it is a program and it cannot do what you do not tell it to. Even if you try to learn the internet, until you are accomplished at it, you will always have some trouble finding what you need. This often leads to trial and error tasks, which for me are the most frustrating of all.
After the initial frustration, we all become Stressed For Many Reasons. Our stress is created by many things such as poor time management, disconfirmed expectations of the workload, and a general lack of understanding. The majority of students that Christine examined seemed to overcome their stress in positive ways instead of letting it overwhelming them.
“[the
stress] only motivated me” -Conrad
Moreno
As long as stress levels are low, they can motivate students to work harder on a project to overcome it. The stress seems to encourage and goad them into conquering the situation. For me, stress is often detrimental but I have seen how other people can respond well to it. If a student does not overcome their stress quickly, it can lead them into the next stage of anxiety.
Irritation and Anxiety occurs when we are confronted with what we do not understand or feel we cannot control. This is similar to the first stage of frustration but it is more severe.
“I
began clicking all over the place. I did not pay attention to the display on
the bottom of the page which showed me how many bytes of the full document had
been received yet. In my despair I actually managed to freeze the screen."
-Ragna
Borries
Any person who does not have very much experience with the internet, especially with dial-up, has probably done what Ragna did, I know that I have often! We have a preconceived notion that the internet should be fast and easy to use. When it is not what we expected and we do not know why we try short cuts like clicking different things on the page. Unfortunately, a supposedly quick fix solution like this can lead to more anxiety.
After we have gone through all of these stages, we Reduce Any Depression that may have evolved out of them. We may or may not know what will trigger feelings of depression, but once it is there it needs to be reduced. Listening to uplifting music or simply relaxing can often be the best solution.
“If
I become really depressed, I find that a long hot shower does wonders for me. I
usually find that after relaxing like that, I come back with even more
creativity, and motivation to do better."
-Shane
Akagi
Kai Hansjurg took a similar point of view in terms of the stages that we go through to obtain success on the internet. Nonetheless, the extreme amount of information available was his main concern. Whether this was options, buttons, or the amount of basic understanding needed to navigate through the internet as a novice, the overwhelming nature of it was an obvious problem in each of his stages.
The stage of Overcoming Different Fears set the claim that we can overcome our predisposed fears through starting something new, and our created fears through learning about them.
“The greatest fear that I have is
accidentally erasing or deleting something. You never know what could happen.
The touch of a single key could, send your file into never, never land.” -Laura
Izutsu
This type of fear is especially common when we are beginning something new or when we do not have much confidence in our selves. The support of an online learning community helps dissolve such fears through the sharing of experiences.
When we feel Frustration In Our Inability To Understand The Machine it is because the large requirements of time and effort exhaust the usefulness of it and make our work seem futile.
“The machine just doesn’t seem to
understand” -Hansjurg
This frustration is similar to the type that Christine noted, but in addition to the problems of trial and error searches was the amount of time that they took. Sometimes the only way to determine what is useful is by expending the time and effort it takes to go to each relevant seeming website and continue until you succeed. Though this could frustrate anyone, it is especially bad for people who expect instant gratification from the web, like me.
Going through the results of your topic search, you may realize that you have entered the most complicated stage of all, The Excess Of The Net. The extremely large number of options on any given webpage (when searching or not) in addition to the huge toolbar allow what can be considered way too many choices. This floods and overwhelms them with more information than they can handle.
“the amount of data available can
easily turn into a nightmare. Too many
choices, not enough time and to much to learn in order to efficient” -Hansjurg
“I
felt panic because there was no way I could figure out how to start with
buttons.”
Without the self-efficacy to navigate through so many options, the student may feel anxiety, panic, and fear. In addition, when you are overloaded with options and toolbars before even beginning a search, it is very hard to keep calm when confronted with 1000 or more hits to your first set of key words. Once the search has been refined, so much extraneous information can still be found, and some of the frustration then comes from the wasted time of sifting through unimportant websites.
In the end, there is only The Difficulties Of Keeping Motivation. Curiosity and learning are the strongest motivations, but preconceived expectations, distractions, and frustration can inhibit them.
“As
soon as I got the basics down I wanted to learn more … talk about becoming
addicted to cyberspace” - Hansjurg
“The
teamwork that I experienced in this class was one of the most fulfilling I have
had in my collage career.” - Robin Miller
The realization that you had to do everything yourself helped and hindered motivation in many cases. If you needed help then it was your job to go out and find it, not the professor’s. A problem like this originally was a hindrance but it also encouraged students to reach out to their classmates in a teamwork fashion as Robin spoke of.
Therefore, in the long run it was very motivating.
I completely agreed with Kai until he discussed motivation. In every other stage, I might have been considered a poster child because I was fearful and frustrated for the same reasons and I am still overwhelmed by the net. I disagreed with him about motivation because though I was interested and curious about learning the internet, when push came to shove the only motivator that kept me moving was the deadlines and even those did not always keep me on track. I wanted to keep my initial motivation for this class and the exploration of the internet, but stressful situations and time constraints prohibited me. I guess I did not quite become an autonomous learning like many others who have gone through this process.
Ryan Mitsui believed that the most important requirement when learning the internet is to have a cyber community with you for help and support. It is difficult in the beginning to navigate through the multitude of rules and limitations of an unknown environment, but
A person new to the internet begins with What are we Doing?! Like other students’ initial stage, trial and error make up a large part of exploring the unknown and add to its troubles.
“I felt confused and disoriented. I didn’t understand what I was supposed to
be doing” - Christina
Kealoha
“I am unable to completely understand
what it all means." - Terri
Slaughter
Though students are often confused, part of the purpose of accessible online generations are to give them confidence in knowing how many other students have experienced the same thing. We have all been there, whether it lasted a minute or the whole semester, but most of us got over it.
The flow between stages one and two is so smooth that the student may not realize that they have moved on, but they have entered Fighting the Flow. This stage is characterized by wanting to give up, resisting help, and refusing to seek it out. Though we still feel the confusion of stage one, we are now afraid to ask for help because we think we should not need it anymore. Well, we always need some help. Even though asking for help would make our problems so easy, we might rather drop out.
“Sol
Valdez has too much pride to ask for help or admit that he doesn't know how
to do things” - Mitsui
This is common and whether we realized that this is what we were feeling, we probably all did experience it!
Once we have all asked for help, or slowly struggled through our problems (without dropping the class), we can say that we have become Almost Literate.
“They are like a worm that has blossomed into
a butterfly” - Mitsui
All of that practice and perseverance has paid off finally and though not many can call themselves an expert, this is the stage where a student can feel some accomplishment.
I think many people can fit into Mitsui’s stages, not because they are scholarly and universal, but that they are fairly broad and shallow. He stated what the student was experiencing but not always why. Part of how he was able to encompass such a broad spectrum of students in his stages was the wide variety of student examples he used that did not seem to really focus in on one idea.
Please go on to view some forms that evaluate my own self-observations. These were completed as I experienced the online generational community through Dr. Leon James Psychology 409bs2003 class. Each form is a piece of my development, as I became more internet literate. This website describing how I gathered the data and the instructions for how the forms were filled out is at
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy18/g18forum.html
From these forms a bibliography report was written and its instructions can be found at
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy18/g18bibliography.html
Though the forms are fairly self-explanatory, it was continuously strange having to fill them out and I never became quite comfortable with it. I can acknowledge the value of filling out such a form before doing internet searches, but for me it was an additional tedious task on top of another stressful one because I had a great deal of difficulty in my searching. I do not believe that the forms had a profound effect on my searches but they did sometimes lower my mood slightly because it was one more thing that I needed to do.
After reviewing the data I obtained from my forms, I was surprised to find that though some days my responses differed greatly, my average responses were a very good representation of my general feelings toward the question at hand. Looking back on my experience, I believe that the forms were well composed and would be very useful to a variety of purposes, including system designers and search engine administrators.
|
|
?
# |
FORM NUMBER |
|
||||||||
|
Question Number |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
Averages |
|
Real time |
135 |
40 |
63 |
50 |
72 |
75 |
108 |
85 |
77 |
78.3333333 |
|
|
expected |
50 |
60 |
90 |
45 |
60 |
105 |
60 |
70 |
45 |
65 |
|
|
6 |
8 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
5 |
9 |
5 |
5 |
4 |
5.333333333 |
|
|
7 |
9 |
8 |
5 |
9 |
9 |
10 |
6 |
9 |
7 |
8 |
|
|
8 |
8 |
10 |
6 |
9 |
3 |
8 |
4 |
6 |
2 |
6.222222222 |
|
|
9 |
8 |
10 |
9 |
8 |
10 |
10 |
6 |
3 |
9 |
8.111111111 |
|
|
10 |
8 |
8 |
7 |
9 |
7 |
5 |
7 |
6 |
4 |
6.777777778 |
|
|
11 |
7 |
7 |
5 |
6 |
8 |
8 |
8 |
5 |
7 |
6.777777778 |
|
|
12 |
10 |
7 |
3 |
10 |
10 |
10 |
10 |
9 |
10 |
8.777777778 |
|
|
13 |
7 |
8 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
9 |
8 |
7 |
8 |
7.888888889 |
|
|
14 |
5 |
9 |
9 |
5 |
8 |
10 |
6 |
10 |
10 |
8 |
|
|
15 |
5 |
4 |
6 |
6 |
3 |
5 |
6 |
5 |
2 |
4.666666667 |
|
|
16 |
7 |
3 |
1 |
2 |
7 |
5 |
7 |
2 |
1 |
3.888888889 |
|
|
17 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
8 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
3.111111111 |
|
|
18 |
8 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
8 |
8 |
7 |
1 |
2 |
4.555555556 |
|
|
19 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1.111111111 |
|
|
20 |
6 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
8 |
7 |
9 |
2 |
2 |
4.444444444 |
|
|
21 |
4 |
5 |
9 |
6 |
2 |
4 |
9 |
2 |
7 |
5.333333333 |
|
|
22 |
9 |
9 |
9 |
9 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
10 |
10 |
7.333333333 |
|
|
23 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
7 |
6 |
8 |
1 |
1 |
3.555555556 |
|
|
24 |
8 |
4 |
3 |
2 |
6 |
7 |
7 |
5 |
5 |
5.222222222 |
|
|
25 |
C |
C |
B |
C |
A |
C |
A |
C |
C |
|
|
Questions 16-19 dealt primarily with my affective response after an internet search. I felt that they did not properly represent me, but then I find myself wondering if it is more likely a discrepancy between how I view my affective self and how I often feel. I consistently scored in the low rage of irritation, anxiety, and rage; my score on frustration was in the medium range (4.5 on a scale of 1-10). My general behavior leads me to more often be anxious in any task including online searches. I would attribute this discrepancy to that I probably refrained from doing my searches when I felt anxious (even though that is often) because I did not view the searches as something I wanted to do but something I had to do. I feel there was some discrepancy between the frustration score also because my memory tells me that I felt often frustrated when searching due to too much information overload. Usually by the end of the search though, I had found some very valuable information and this relieved some of my frustration. It might be better, though tedious, after every 30 minutes of searching for students to answer questions about their affect in terms of anxiety, rage, frustration and irritation.
In terms of my cognitive self, I felt more confident and more motivated as I did more searches, but the data did not reveal that. If in an area I began high, even though I might have had a few low days, I was consistently high, rather than raising my average score. In the comments section of cognition focused questions, I noticed that my answers were often negative and implying that there was outward pressure on my numerical answers rather than that they were based on my own volition, such as
“In one hour I have to stop, no matter what.”
I had trouble finding questions that evaluated changes in my sensorimotor information behavior, except for that I was spending more time doing my searches as I did more of them. I believe this was because as I became more familiar and comfortable with online searching, I demanded higher standards of myself and more in-depth searches and answers. Cognitively, I was not content with posting on the discussion forum a flippant message with no sort of scholarly report to back it up (though many of my classmates did). So this requirement of myself made me spend more time on my searches so that they were complete and to the standards of the course.
Though I have stated above that I personally do not agree with my own data reports about myself, I acknowledge the value of the averages that I found. Cognitively, I held high expectations for success, which is in my nature, and I did not have high expectations of improvement, which served to be true. Online searching is a skill and I am a person who would need much more experience than I have to improve at it. Overall, my cognitive information behavior yielded high expectations of my abilities and of the outcome. In addition, I held consistent expectations of similarity when comparing one search to others. My affective information behavior was generally moderate (having no specific negative feelings like rage) to positive which I feel is very representative of my personality. My sensorimotor information behavior was difficult for me to assess, but it is obvious that I gained speed and reliability in the key words I entered and the forms that I filled out weekly.
I did attribute a great deal of my success to the computer or search engine I used. I reliable answered that I felt it was easy to use a computer or search engine. Also, I held a moderately high belief that search engines make it easy to find information as compared to luck or my own skills. This is due to the numerous amount of trial and error searching that I underwent. Often the only reason that I found such good results was due to the search engine because I used the same technique in many different mediums.
In the 1970’s, Dr. Leon James began a project that has mow culminated in the expression of the “Taxonomy of Instructional Objectives for Online Generational Curriculum.” This can be viewed in an easily discernable appendix and table form here. Even so, the decomposition of how this data was obtained and created is invaluable in its own right and can be read in its entirety here.
All students begin as novices or beginners and there can be many steps that are experience as they become more skilled. In Dr. James’ paper he acknowledges the many variations of paths that a student may take, but concentrates on three main stages and analyzes each through an affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor lens. The first phase involves acknowledging your place among current and previous students and using it to understand the information available. The second phase concentrates on using the advice and experiences of past generations to shape and guide your own choices in proceeding to become a self-sufficient and independent learner. The third phase marks the accomplishments of the previous phases and requires the student to use what they have learned to benefit past, current, and future generations for reason of devotion to those generations rather than a grade or deadline.
Dr. James consistently uses links within his paper to allow the reader experience the interactive aspect of the generational community. This is a very effective measure to help the reader connect with what otherwise might be an intangible idea of links creating a community in cyber-space. As the reader views his paper and the statements of students, it becomes apparent that this community (though not physically interactive) is incredible valuable and supportive to its members. This support that evolves out of Dr. James’ community is largely why it has been so successful in leading students through the three phases in all parts of the three fold self: affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor.