Blogging Pedagogy - reflection

Student Research in the Era of Bookless Libraries

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

Author:

Dustin Hixenbaugh

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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.

The End-of-Semester Talk

Jay Voss — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:05:50 +0000

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Jay Voss

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Storyful.com

Towards the end of the semester, I always like asking students to reflect upon what they have learned and to assess the value of it. This is probably a fairly standard practice – I remember teachers doing it to myself since second grade – but it seems more necessary in these days of budget cuts and attitudes fostered by entitled entertainment. Big pictures are good, especially when you’re teaching rhetoric to a room full of science and business majors. The moment for this reflection always comes at that point in the semester (for myself and my students) inwhich work isn’t divinely inspired but rather fragmented and hurried, an ethic not necessarily lending itself towards deliberation. This semester I was just thinking I’d have the moment with my students during the last week of classes, before they ran off to jump their last hurdles of library books and/or end up in the pool. But then a cup of coffee got me thinking.

I was at Starbucks and had just read Paul Krugman’s recent column, “The Amnesia Candidate” (22 April 2012). The article is a thoughtful evaluation of Mitt Romney’s most recent campaign rhetoric, and is especially efficient in the way it attacks the former governor for blaming some of Bush’s legacy on Obama. While Krugman does concede that Obama could have handled economic matters differently, he ultimately concludes by asking “Are the American people forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work?”. This is a complex question. You hear cynics complain all the time that American voters have a 6-month attention span, which is often compromised by consumer culture’s narcotization. I think this is probably true to a degree, but how could it not be given technology’s onslaught of information? It isn’t so much a question of whether or not voters can recall that Romney’s speech was given in a warehouse which was shut down during the Bush years – to suggest as much is to blame the average American voter for not having the mind of a Princeton professor, which would be ignorant. “Work” here, it seems to me, is a question or whether or not Romney can emotionally engage his base. The more that Americans are thinking critically about their environment, the more likely they are to realize (not remember) that the president has very little to do with the economy.

This got me thinking about the goals I set for my own students, as well as why the University of Texas might require first-year non-majors to take a basic composition course. I investigated Romney’s rhetoric a little bit, found a new TV ad that advances his “Obama Isn’t Working” slogan and sought out the warehouse speech that Krugman takes him to task for. I printed out eighteen copies of Krugman’s Op-Ed and was ready to have “the talk” with my students. The discussion opened with a general discussion of what they learned over the course of the semester, which as a group they had no problem recalling all the various concepts. It was hard for them to contextualize this learning, however. Obviously, some said that it’d help them write better in the major, etc. But not a one of them could tell me why such a course was required at a public university, nor why Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin insisted upon similar programs of study when they founded the universities of Virginia and Philadelphia.

We started with Romney’s latest TV ad. The students had a lot to say about how it resembled a movie trailer, and how its particular unemployment statistics for North Carolina weren’t necessarily impressive (“that’s only the amount of people that can fit inside the Longhorns football stadium”). When we got to Romney’s speech, my students nailed most of the points that Krugman makes in his Op-Ed. The only point of Krugman’s they didn’t get to was the question of whether or not “the American people are forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work.” My students weren’t eligible to vote back when Bush was in charge, and I got the impression from them that there were more important things in high school than reading the morning paper. And who am I to blame them for this shortsightedness? Romney’s attack wasn’t working here not because they remembered enough of the past to see its fallacies, but rather because they were thinking critically about their environment. I passed around Krugman’s Op-Ed and they saw that collectively they’d reached his conclusions. Now asked again what they learned over the course of the semester, the answer was obvious and apparent.