The Scent of Information

I’d been thinking about open educational resources (OER) and how students might “learn” from the World Wide Web. In my non-majors chemistry course this semester, I chose not to assign a textbook as part of an OER initiative. Instead I assign reading from a couple of online texts plus a few other resources here and there. But do the students read these resources? My quizzes suggest that many of them do not, or they don’t understand what they’re reading even though I’ve picked what seems to me relatively straightforward information.

My very knowledgeable wife sent me an interesting article about how folks browse the Internet for information. It’s an old article (from 2003), but well-written and insightful. The title is “Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster”. The main concept is information scent. Here’s how the authors describe it: “Users estimate a given hunt’s likely success from the spoor: assessing whether their path exhibits cues related to the desired outcome. Informavores will keep clicking as long as they sense (to mix metaphors) that they're "getting warmer" – the scent must keep getting stronger and stronger, or people give up. Progress must seem rapid enough to be worth the predicted effort required to reach the destination.”

In the early years, when search algorithms were still in their infancy, the vast majority of websites you might come across were not of the highest quality. So once you found one, the best strategy was to stick with it; moving on would likely yield less desirable results. Thus, the rationale behind designing a website to attract readers was to make the sites “sticky” by having the initial scent of good content lead to more good content. Hungry users follow the scent!

However thanks to powerful search engines like Google and its contemporary cousins, the ease of finding “good” websites has increased significantly. The downside is that it leads to information snacking, brief visits where the scent leads a tasty morsel, and then departing to find a different morsel elsewhere. Instead of the all-in-one banquet, the modern “informavore” prefers the progressive tapas dinner across multiple locations. In this case, traveling between locations is at the speed of lightning. This leads to different strategies in website design.

What does this have to do with OER? I’ve been mulling over what a good strategy might be for self-paced learning via OER. Not just superficial learning of a factoid here and there, but deep learning that is coherent and indeed leverages the connectivity of the Internet of today and tomorrow. Does one go immersive in a web-based World-of-Warcraft type system? Or is there some other way to curate from the best but somehow have the user/learner directed in such a way that maximum learning, perhaps even mastery learning, takes place. It needs to be attractive enough so that someone who catches the scent is motivated to keep going. But it’s unclear what indeed is the best scent to incentivize learning.

Thinking about this reminds me that I really need to take some time to ponder the deep structure of chemistry in the context of curriculum design. One thing I’m enjoying with my OER approach is a large degree of freedom in re-organizing the material in a way that I hope promotes the scaffolding of deep structure. While few of the students in my non-majors class will go on to take other chemistry classes at least as college students, but if I can instill enough of a scent, maybe they will pursue learning some more on their own later in life. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but the small dose of idealism helps keep me going. So far I haven’t made large-scale changes, perhaps from too many years of hewing to a standard curricular approach. But Spring Break is coming up, and I’m motivated to think about this issue more carefully!

(I’ve also been tweaking my science-majors chemistry course, and perhaps that is where it is even more important to implant deep structure.)