In pursuit of the unreadable...
I rather enjoyed this article from today's Times Higher Ed:
"Baffled by the ease with which titles promising to turn world history on its head have won huge audiences despite defying logic and lacking proof, Daniel Melia laboured to divine the hidden secrets that allow anyone to identify truly 'bad books'"
Particularly interested, though not entirely surprised - because I'm beginning to see this myself among our undergraduate students - that
"most of these students had actually never really dealt with books as books. Most of their school reading was from anthologies and few of them regarded books - codices - as more than physical frames for content, the context of which remained unexamined."
Our students increasingly assume that all information can/should be downloaded in chunks - and indeed, when it comes to individual journal articles, or chapters of key textbooks, we in the Library encourage and indeed facilitate this. Library and teaching staff are increasingly needing to offset that by actively, explicitly teaching students critical skills which require them to recognise that, at least for the moment, the terms "book", "monograph", "peer-reviewed journal", "journal article" etc still mean something even in the context of content that you actually accessed online, and that which of those categories a chunk of content came from tells you something about the nature and the reliability of the information within; "Dunno what it is, I found it online" doesn't really cut it...
The vox pops from various other academics about "what makes a bad book", however, are unintentionally rather funny since, rather than addressing the same arguments the author used in the main piece, they largely launch straight into questions of taste/bitchery about others' disciplines. (And yes, quelle surprise, a professor of English who can't read Tolkien.)
[Cross-posted at both LJ and DW - feel free to comment at either...]
"Baffled by the ease with which titles promising to turn world history on its head have won huge audiences despite defying logic and lacking proof, Daniel Melia laboured to divine the hidden secrets that allow anyone to identify truly 'bad books'"
Particularly interested, though not entirely surprised - because I'm beginning to see this myself among our undergraduate students - that
"most of these students had actually never really dealt with books as books. Most of their school reading was from anthologies and few of them regarded books - codices - as more than physical frames for content, the context of which remained unexamined."
Our students increasingly assume that all information can/should be downloaded in chunks - and indeed, when it comes to individual journal articles, or chapters of key textbooks, we in the Library encourage and indeed facilitate this. Library and teaching staff are increasingly needing to offset that by actively, explicitly teaching students critical skills which require them to recognise that, at least for the moment, the terms "book", "monograph", "peer-reviewed journal", "journal article" etc still mean something even in the context of content that you actually accessed online, and that which of those categories a chunk of content came from tells you something about the nature and the reliability of the information within; "Dunno what it is, I found it online" doesn't really cut it...
The vox pops from various other academics about "what makes a bad book", however, are unintentionally rather funny since, rather than addressing the same arguments the author used in the main piece, they largely launch straight into questions of taste/bitchery about others' disciplines. (And yes, quelle surprise, a professor of English who can't read Tolkien.)
[Cross-posted at both LJ and DW - feel free to comment at either...]