The Eye of the Thai-ger

Not the Thai-tanic

For this week’s activity, exploring the pedagogy of abundance, Michael and Sue joined forces to explore an area of interest and report on the implications of the abundance of digital content.  Join us on our journey to find out more about the history of Thai food!

Constructing our search

We identified our topic asynchronously through Slack. Both of us have a love of Thai food and wanted to find out more about the history of how the combination of sweet, sour, salty, spicy and bitter tastes that characterize Thai Food.  

If at first you do not succeed, try Thai again

We agreed to conduct independent searches, using a variety of different search engines, and search parameters derived from The history of Thai food. 

We created a chart to record our results.  Before starting, we incorporated some of the suggestions from Will’s post on Considering your topic and constructing your search, and created a list of synonyms and search parameters (W.Meredith, personal communication, September, 19, 2018).  

 

Search  Engine	Search parameters	Number of results	Time to get results	Comments
Google	History of Thai Food	168,000,000	0.73 seconds	Most had the same limited information such as countries of origin,   taste, ingredients, variations by region etc. Most sources seemed to restaurants with a brief historical blurb One scholarly article (2nd page) No references
Google Scholar	History of Thai Food	270,000	0.07 seconds	Most articles did not pertain to the history of Thai food
You Tube	History of Thai Food	N/S	N/A	Documentaries about Thai food that did not include history Lots of amateur videos – no references Cooking shows with no history
Google	“Food” AND “Thai” AND “History”	157,000,00	0.83 seconds	Same links as previous searches on first page
Google Scholar	“Food” AND “Thai” AND “History”	270,000	0.07 seconds	Same results as previous search “History of Thai food”
Google	Origin of Thai food	32,700,000	0.78 seconds	Mostly listing of restaurants with reviews
Google Scholar	Origin of Thai food	94,800	0.35 seconds	Most articles did not pertain to the history of Thai food
BING	History of Thai food	21,800,000	N/A	Similar results as Google
Encyclopedia Brittanica	History of Thailand	1,730,000,000	0.74 seconds	Much rich history of the people, culture, economics etc.   Some information on the history of the food
Google	Evolution of Thai Food	17,500,000	0.35 seconds	Similar results to previous searches
Discovery	History of Thai Food	1161		Covered food and Thai culture
Discovery	“History” AND “Thai” AND “Food”	1093		Similar to previous search – mostly Thai culture and some cuisine
Discovery	“Chronology” AND “Thai” AND “Food”	19		Mostly about general information about agriculture in South East Asia
Google	History of Thai Cuisine and influences	83,000,000	.65 sec	Strong initial results indicating some information about the history of Thai food
Google	Thai food history timeline	21,300,000	.7 sec	Very similar to previous results
Google scholar	Thai food historical timeline	7,680	.08 sec	Poor results. Covered a wide range of topics about Thailand
Google Scholar	“timeline” AND “Thai” AND “Food”	7,590	.04 sec	Similar poor results from previous search
YouTube	“Thailand food” timeline	NA	NA	Starts off with relevant topic, but then quickly diverges into broader topics
YouTube	History of Thai food (also Thai food history)	NA	NA	Almost exact same as previous results.

 

As you can see, and as you learnt through your own experiences with the activity, when utilising search engines such as Google and Bing we retrieved millions of resources.  The challenge now was to weed through the massive amounts of resources and choices and determine which ones were valuable.

 

I soup-pose this looks right

Evaluating the literature to ensure its validity.

What we learned is the quantity does not necessarily mean quality!  Much of the literature we encountered was Produsage or as Anderson (2016) defines “user-led content creation, consumption, and active production online” (p. 41).  It was often of poor quality or intended to promote a business or product. Some of the criteria that we used to filter the massive amounts of information were:

• Consideration would only be given to the first ten to fifteen results.  We rarely went past the first page.
• If there were duplications in concepts we accepted them as being valid.
• Who was the author? Were they part of an organization?
• Did they provide contact information on the webpage?   
• Did the site look professional?  Were there errors in spelling?
• Was there an opportunity for others to comment and share their knowledge and experiences?  
• Did the site share reading lists through social bookmarking? (Weller, 2011, p. 228).

The last two points made up a large part of our criteria for assessing validity.  For as Anderson (2016), states “It is through the digital traces of others that learners may formulate connected pathways to accessible online learning resources.” (p. 45).

 

En-Thai-sing

Does abundant content enable learning?

Abundant content does not promote learning on its own. “The transition from scarcity to abundance introduces massive amounts of information and choice, challenging students and instructors to develop their judgment, comparison, and evaluation skills” (Anderson, 2016, p. 41).   Although our search was on an informal topic, it occurred to us that the skills and criteria we used to assess the validity of the content retrieved through our searches was largely gained through experience, not something that was taught to us. We learned through the painful experience of hours of searching for resources to support our topics in the libraries, online, and from our parents, teachers and friends.  “In this digital, networked age, how can we ensure that learning environments are created and used by learners to access, process, filter, recommend, and apply information with the aid of machines, peers, and experts within the learning network” (Anderson, 2016, p. 43)? Weller (2011), posits that “moving to a more participatory, socially constructed view of knowledge” such as, resource and problem based learning, constructivism, communities of practice and connectivism learning theories could assist in accomplishing this (p. 228).  

Warschaeur (2007), postulates that learners must gain information and multimedia literacy skills to enable digital learning. He defines the two skills as follows:

Information literacy – refers to the ability to define what sorts of information are needed; locate the needed information efficiently; evaluate information and its sources critically; incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base; understand the economic, legal and social issues surrounding the use of information; and access information ethically and legally (p. 42).

Multimedia literacy – refers to the ability to interpret, design, and create content that makes use of images, photographs, video, animation, music, sounds, texts, and typography (p. 43).

He also believes that mentorship and modeling from faculty, parents, siblings and friends plays a large role in whether or not learners develop these skills.

As free content continues to grow in abundance, educators must be mindful to provide learning activities that focus not only on content, but also include opportunities for learners to hone their evaluative skills and support the new ways in which knowledge is created (Anderson, 2016).

 

Food that is to Thai for

Thank you for joining us on our journey, and that you wanted to wok this way. To Thai it all together we encourage you to be mindful in your academic searches in the consumption of knowledge. Thai to remember the importance of validity in the medium, otherwise when you write a paper you may find yourself tongue Thai’d.

If you are too Thai-erd to read this blog, or you are short on Thai-m, you can learn about the history of Thai food through this video – 

References

Anderson, T. (2016). Chapter 3: Theories for Learning with Emerging Technologies. In Veletsianos, G. (Ed). Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning: Foundations and Applications. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press.

Warschauer, M. (2007). The paradoxical future of digital learning. Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 41–49.

Weller, M. (2011). A pedagogy of abundance. Spanish Journal of Pedagogy, 249, 223–236.