Blogging Pedagogy - research

Student Research in the Era of Bookless Libraries

Dustin Hixenbaugh — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 03:36:59 +0000

Author:

Dustin Hixenbaugh

Image Credit:

Ghostbuster Wiki: The Compendium of Ghostbusting

Debating what new technologies mean for old libraries is one of the Internet's favorite obsessions. On one side of the issue there are the Defeatists who think that every innovation is a nail in the library's metaphorical coffin. When Florida Polytechnic University recently announced that it had opened an entirely bookless library, the Defeatists took to Twitter to voice their disappointment:

As the US continues to eviscerate #highered, Florida Polytechnic opens a library w/ no physical books... http://t.co/tCKrlGnPfu

— Mike Bess (@mkbess) August 31, 2014

A bookless library: http://t.co/0JdTtR7wUp (If it won't have books, can't we at least call it something besides "library"?) @prufrocknews

— Gracy Olmstead (@gracyolmstead) August 26, 2014

I appreciate this second tweet because it reminds me of the complaints my undergraduate institution received when it announced that it was going to renovate its library to accommodate a coffee shop. Is a library still a library when it buys subscriptions to e-books in lieu of the books themselves? When its employees mix lattes instead of hissing their patrons into silence? The Defeatists think not.

On the other side of the issue there are the Optimists. They tend to claim that literature has an enduring appeal that will survive the transfer from paper to PDF and that libraries like the one at Florida Polytechnic are wisely evolving to meet the needs and interests of modern readers. They also tend to defend their perspective using statistics that are as catchy as they are inconclusive: The majority of millennials know where their local library is! In the United States there are more libraries than there are McDonald's!

I think it is because I am more Optimist than Defeatist that I decided to require that the undergraduates in the "Rhetoric of Country Music" course that I am teaching this semester conduct research using library books.

Yes, it surprised me when the mostly junior and senior students who enrolled in my class reported that they had neither visited the main branch of the University of Texas library system nor checked out even one of UT's more than eight million books. But I recognize that my own sentimental attachment to libraries comes more from my grandmother taking me to one for puppet shows every week when I was a child than from finding them useful as an adult (though I do). As a Ph.D. student, I enjoy accessing materials instantly through the library's e-books and online databases and have consumed my weight many times over in library coffee shops. I would not say either of these innovations has damaged my appreciation for books.

The project I assigned had students work in groups to research a subgenre of country music (i.e., honky tonk, rockabilly, Outlaw). My aim was to give students experience researching with books, but also to ensure that they were engaging robust scholarly texts. My research for the syllabus led me to believe that the best research about country music is, in fact, printed in books. The field's leading scholars tend to publish their work in edited collections rather than referreed journals, and the Internet sources that rank highest in Google searches are typically promotional and not ideal for student research.

At first my inner Defeatest wanted to plan a lesson that would climax in what César Salgado calls a "'Eureeka!' moment" ("Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory," 1999). After my 75-minute class I hoped my students would throw their hands into the air and pledge to apply for cards at the ten nearest libraries. Such expectations, I realized as I prepared the Research Guide, were as impractically high as they were misguided.

The truth is that modern libraries do not necessarily want their patrons visiting them in the flesh, let alone disturbing the stacks searching for particular titles. At UT, students can print whole chapters from a variety of e-books and even request that sections from physical books be scanned and delivered to them electronically. Students who want to borrow actual books or CDs, DVDs, and other materials that are impossible to scan can click the "Pick It Up!" button and have these items delivered to the hold desk at any library location they choose. UT is by no means the only library to offer these kinds of services.

The primary challenge that my students faced was determining which books or sections of books they wanted. At UT, students placing scan requests are required to specify exact titles and page numbers, but since the library's catalog does not consistently record this information, it has to be located elsewhere. The fact that Amazon, Google Books, and publishers' websites provide these details makes a good argument for digital innovations actually helping users take advantage of libraries' print resources.

After completing this project most of my students still have not set foot in the UT library nor checked out a book. For the record, I consider this a somewhat disappointing success. But more importantly, they have written extensive webpage-essays synthesizing the library's best research on country music--and in a remarkably brief period of time. I would love to know what you think about their work.

Optimist that I am, I think bookless may be alright.

Bad Searches and Cultivating Healthy Ambivalence

Jeremy Smyczek — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 19:54:34 +0000

Author:

Jeremy Smyczek

Image Credit:

DianesDigitals

Students seem to arrive in my rhetoric classes (RHE 306 and 309K so far) with a polarized understanding of how to use the internet's two most common research tools: Google and Wikipedia. They've either not been clued in (or at least pretend) that both resources are problematic in terms of reliability, or they've been told that both are the devil, to be avoided by any serious scholar.

As is so often the case, my main concern as an instructor is to get students to realize that the whole story is complex: the internet provides tools, and like traditional tools such as saws and hammers, they provide tremendous saved labor if used with caution and training, and, in much the same regard, have elevating sequences of consequences (e.g. inaccuracy, plagiarism, libel) when used carelessly or naively.

An exercise that points this out—I call it the “bad search” exercise—is to have students perform a Google search for Martin Luther King, Jr. (This specific example isn’t hugely important, as search results change and there are many instances of the kind of problem illustrated.) Depending on the day and the level of personalization software on each student’s computer, somewhere in the top ten (after the MLK Wikipedia page, of course) will appear “Martin Luther King: A True Historical Examination.” It appears at www.martinlutherking.org.

Many students have been taught that .org, which often reflects nonprofit status, reflexively grants reliability. So imagine their consternation to realize that they have, in this case, stumbled upon a libelous hate site hosted by Stormfront, a white supremacist group. This fact isn’t apparent without some poking around on the page itself, so in all likelihood, some student somewhere has used this site as an informational source. Errors of this general category doubtless occur daily.

The takeaway point is that search engines are unmediated by human editors: they can save labor on the front end by amalgamating awesome sums of information, but can then restore it by causing users to misevaluate any given source, since it has typically not been vetted for accuracy.

The same applies to Wikipedia. We want students to consider that group editing, while reasonably reliable, lends itself to all manner of exceptions ranging from deliberate spoofs and hoaxes to idiosyncratic fan pages. A “bad search” exercise that provides working examples of the latter are searches for pages devoted to pro wrestlers: while they’ve gotten better since I started performing this exercise, they still weave “in-universe” narratives into attempts at legitimate biography, making it near-impossible for students to figure out which events occurred historically and which as part of the scripted wrestling narrative.

And yet, virtually every major Wikipedia article features a long list of references representing a great deal of embedded labor to pool information on a given topic in one place. Many of these references themselves link to reliable articles, and so Wikipedia is actually ideal as a place to get started. Even if the articles themselves are not academically viable resources, we need not reinvent the wheel by beginning searches from scratch.

This loops us back, recursively, to the problem outlined at the outset: how do we get students themselves to evaluate individual sources, like those found using Google, such as might be found in the Wikipedia article reference list? It’s a much harder task than saying “Wikipedia and Google bad” or that of unconditional endorsement of the internet as a labor-saving tool. Use of academic databases is one way of screening in advance, of course, but is still a kind of argument from external authority that merely repackages the problem of evaluation for credibility.

The simplest answer is to teach students to evaluate all sources both internally and contextually, and to view quick internet seraches with healthy ambivalence. Teaching that, however, takes longer than a day.

Researching Public Issues with Twitter

Kendall Gerdes — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:21:41 +0000

Author:

Kendall Gerdes

Image Credit:

Class Twitter account, @rhetoric306, with Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (5th ed.) as background

I ask my RHE 306 class, Rhetoric and Writing, to focus their writing for the semester around a single public issue. I want students in my class to concentrate on the kinds of disagreements that, however intractable, demand a response. So I ask them to frame their issues as policy questions. As we near the time when I ask students to begin researching their issues in earnest, I've been looking for ways to improve my lesson on library research.

I usually tour students around the library website, walk them through different resources, databases, and ways to search the library site. I also like to give them an article that cites it sources and show them how to track down these sources' originals. They tend to come away from this exercise as big fans of Google Scholar—probably because it's not too far away from what for most of them is already their primary research tool: Google.

Incorporating Your Own Research

Because I allow my students to select their own topics for the semester, I often get a wide range of mostly current public issues. I'm not a news junkie, but I could be, so I restrict my news intake to my favorite cable news podcast and to Twitter. That usually gives me some broad knowledge about the kinds of topics my student choose. As I set my students to in-class exercises like practicing summaries, I like to bring in articles I find that relate to students' topics and maybe challenge their established ways of thinking.

Where do I find those kinds of articles? Well, Twitter. I've been on Twitter (@kendalljoy) for about 5 years, and because I like to read everything I've missed since the last time I checked Twitter, I like to keep the list of people I follow relatively small and manageable. That means I unfollow people I don't read carefully and add new followers only when they have consistently interesting tweets.

Twitter for Instant Research

I only just realized I've been depriving students of one of my own main research tools: Twitter. Yes, they need to learn to do scholarly research using the library resources, but this kind of research often leads to useful finds on an issue's background and history, or to relatively refined opinion writing that's been through a slower editorial gatekeeping process. They need all that. But sometimes they can't distinguish it from anything else they'd find online: daily news, blogs, etc. But that kind of up-to-the-minute material is useful, too, especially when students are writing about issues that are even now the subject of public debate and new policy proposals: gun control, immigration reform, abortion restrictions, and the like.

I'm developing a lesson plan to teach my students to conduct research with Twitter. (In a few weeks, I'll post it to the DWRL's Lesson Plans site) What I envision is a class Twitter account (@rhetoric306) and an initial requirement of a professional Twitter account (I'll allow students to use personal account but invite them to create a fresh start if they'd like); a proposed hash tag for class tweets that is short, unique, and informative; and a tweet introducing one high-quality Twitter account relevant to their topic that they'd like the class to follow. The goal will be to get students to help each other conduct current research even as they learn to distinguish between the kinds of material they'll find informally online and the more academic resources they'll need to get through the library.

Twitter Dreams

I've been looking for ways to incorporate more digital and social media into my classes, but I can be choosy about fitting the form to the lesson. I'm excited about using Twitter to teach public issues research because it feels both a little technologically adventurous and because its germane to the classroom topic. My hope is that my students will invent ways of using our Twitter network to help each other and to write that I haven't been able to anticipate.

Meanwhile, I'm drawing up guidelines to help them formally learn to use the medium and to maximize Twitter's research potential. I can already imagine the conversations we'll provoke about commonplaces, expertise, journalistic reporting versus opinion writing, and invention in 140 characters. Are you using Twitter in your classroom? What are the issues you'd want a lesson plan to address? What resources have you found for students using Twitter in class? Tweet your answers to me @kendalljoy!

25 Things Students Forget About the Internet, or Why Explicit Instruction of Internet Literacy is Vital (Plus a Special Bonus Thing!!)

Wall — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:41:58 +0000

Author:

Amanda Wall

Image Credit:

Steve Rhode

This list is by no means complete. If I had the time, it would probably be 50 items long instead of 25. It came about as I was mulling over how to explain to students that no, the audience for any given text on the internet is (probably) not all internet users. And I realized that there are lot of these simple ideas floating around that many people don't know or ignore or forget, partly because some of them are commonsensical and don't seem to be worth mentioning and partly because they are made invisible by a lot of the popular ways of using and thinking about the internet. My title for this list was originally "25 Things Students Don't Know About the Internet," but as I began brainstorming, I realized that teachers (myself included) also tend to forget these simple ideas and thus forget to mention them to our students. And students will often readily assent to these ideas; they simply don't realize they're acting on these hidden assumptions.

Tekla Hawkins kindly suggested a couple of these ideas. The last four are, I admit, more controversial than the others, but definitely ideas that I'm willing to argue. I'm grateful for suggestions for additions to the list, or alternately, counterarguments about the current items.

25 Things We Forget About the Internet (+ One Bonus Thing)

Not everyone in the world or even the U.S. has access to the internet.
Not everyone who does have access also has consistent access to the internet.
All information on the internet is NOT available at all times to all internet users.
Even if information is in a publicly accessible space on the internet, not everyone will see it.
A lot of information is only "publicly accessible" if you have the right computer, the right browser, and the right physical abilities.
All this means that, even if information is posted in a publicly accessible space on the internet, the actual audience is definitely not everyone on the internet.
The author's intended audience is probably also not everyone on the internet. If they say that it is, they're (probably) not thinking very rhetorically.
Sometimes people don't like it when you take the information they posted publicly for one audience and put it elsewhere for a different audience --yes, even when it was already "public." For every example ever, see Facebook.
Just because you can find information on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
Just because you can't find information in the first two or three searches doesn't mean it's not on the internet.
Just because you can't find information on the internet in the first twenty or thirty searches doesn't mean it's not on the internet.
Accordingly, the ability to search for and find particular, credible sources of information is a skill that must be learned.
Just because information isn't available on the internet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Just because information isn't available on the internet doesn't mean you don't need it.
Not everyone on the internet is an asshole.
Not everyone on the internet will be nice to you or give you the benefit of the doubt.
Your ability to be anonymous in any internet space is always limited and contingent.
Your ability to be transparent in any internet space is always limited and contingent.
Your ability to choose your audience in any internet space is always limited and contingent.
Not every piece of text and media on the internet is free for the taking or unlimited use.
But some things are, for some uses. These uses depends on a host of things, including but not limited to federal law, accepted practice, and good manners.
Web utopians think the internet or its associated technologies have a revolutionary potential that will save our minds, our businesses, our politics, and in some cases, our souls. It won't.
Web dystopians think the internet or its associate technologies are destroying our attention spans, our ability to communicate with each other, and the quality of our cultural output. It's not.
The internet, like every other technology, works with and through and on society. One does not independently cause effects on the other.
For all of these reasons, to use the internet thoughtfully and rhetorically must be considered a literacy, and one which must be explicitly taught to all of us who bounce so recklessly and hopefully around this new frontier.

Bonus: Like most other composition technologies, the internet is a source of both joy and terror about our responsibilities to ourselves and to each other. Internet forever.