1.3: Knowledge Constructor

Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.

a. Students plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.
b. Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility and relevance of information, media, data or other resources.
c. Students curate information from digital resources using a variety of tools and methods to create collections of artifacts that demonstrate meaningful connections or conclusions.
d. Students build knowledge by actively exploring real-world issues and problems, developing ideas and theories and pursuing answers and solutions.

We began learning about Student Standard 3, Knowledge Constructor, early on in the DEL program, and I am thankful for the opportunity to have taken the time to research the role that we have as not only consumers on the internet, but also as constructors. Matt Miller says “if everyone consumed and no one created, the internet wouldn’t exist” (2019). This helped me to start understanding that we need to get our students to switch their mindset from one of pure consumption to one of curation.

So how do we do that? If we truly want our students to be “actively exploring real-world issues” we have to get them to start asking questions. Students aren’t used to this active piece of education, many have gone their entire education in a passive state of being a student. This thinking helped gear my thinking in my post, Creating Critical Curators Through Knowledge Constructing. 

Another aspect of the Knowledge Constructor standard however is to “evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility and relevance” of the information that they are seeing online. This indicator changes the focus from being the constructor, to evaluating the constructed. This lead to multiple of the learning objectives in my project, Community Engagement Through Understanding by Design.