In pursuit of the unreadable...

[azalaisdep]

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

Comments

[dwimordene_2011]

God, yes - I just finished grading a set of preliminary annotated bibliographies. I asked for a mix of sources, but several students gave me nothing but online websites, and we're not talking about scholarly websites. We're talking medical sites online aimed at distributing factoids to those members of the public concerned to attain certain, predictable ends. These are the types of literature they find useful and rave over - factoid lists without context, links, sometimes not even authors! "It gave me so many facts about the matter!"

They didn't even go to an encyclopedia or reference work on the topic, which might've told them many facts they needed to know, plus context and major research trends in the field by professionals.

[azalaisdep]

Find out whether those students get a compulsory class in critical evaluation of sources from one of your reference librarians. If not, strongly suggest to the course directors that they need one ;-)

Or at the very least point them at one of the excellent tutorials out there on how to evaluate the quality of a Web source, like Internet Detective...

[dwimordene_2011]

They have a *mandatory* library class for this particular core requirement - which they already underwent. Things don't sink in the first time - habit is strong.

Thanks for the suggestion of "Internet Detective"; I'll look at this and may suggest it to my class.

Great icon, btw - very appropriate!

[azalaisdep]

my Despairing Elrond icon, he has so many uses...

You're so right about strength of habit, too - and I also find students are very poor at transferring skills/information given in one module, into another; when I've taught them database searching skills in the context of one module, they then turn up at the Enquiry Desk needing to do a search for another module and not knowing how. When I remind them that what I taught them last semester should be applicable here, you can hear the cogs grinding painfully...

Internet Detective does at least ram home fairly simply why You Can't Just Rely On The Internet. I'm also quite fond of this Youtube video posted by the University of Liverpool subject librarians, though of course you'd have to redirect your students to your uni's Library website, but it makes the general point ;-)

[dwimordene_2011]

I also find students are very poor at transferring skills/information given in one module, into anotherYou put your finger on something that frustrates me, and which our module-based style of presenting material tends to aggravate, I think

[azalaisdep]

our module-based style of presenting material tends to aggravate, I thinkThere's been quite a lot of comment in UK higher education in the last couple of years that we are just now seeing the first generation of undergraduates who came all the way through school with the National Curriculum, with its rather rigid ideas about what content should be taught where and when, plus very modularised school exam systems. Certainly a lot of academic staff are complaining that they struggle with students who think in this incredibly modular way, who don't cross-connect or cross-apply skills, and who therefore have no idea how to solve problems in an unfamiliar context. Slightly alarming, since most of the usefulness of education in later life surely relates to the solving of problems in unfamiliar contexts by applying critical faculties