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 ( Read more... )
"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 ( Read more... )
Comments 12
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.
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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...
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Thanks for the suggestion of "Internet Detective"; I'll look at this and may suggest it to my class.
Great icon, btw - very appropriate!
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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 ;-)
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- Erulisse (one L)
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I am of the generation where we still got given books to read and had to write regular reviews of them.
And although I have muttered and moaned about 'the referencing' for the assessed essay for my prescriber's course, I do know how to decide on whether a source is reliable, how to search for relevant stuff, and so on...
My main moan was that we weren't allowed to use footnotes for references and so all the Tom, Dick & Harry (1999) stuff counted in the word count... and I kept getting the italics in the wrong places in the actual reference list.
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Every children's author whom I've ever heard comment on the Literacy Hour and the current GCSE English curriculum, from Philip Pullman to Michael Rosen, decries precisely that problem.
As with so many aspects of the current, over-prescriptive British curriculum, I suspect really good and confident teachers teach the way they always have, in the knowledge that a) one should read Whole Books and that b) any child who can competently read/review an entire book can do so to an extract; but it allows pressured or easily-cowed teachers to get by on "just teaching the extracts", which is completely meaningless in the context of any kind of reading for pleasure or for life :-(
My main moan was that we weren't allowed to use footnotes for references and so all the Tom, Dick & Harry (1999) stuff counted in the word count..Oh, the joys of Harvard referencing. The hours I spend reassuring panicked students about whether or not they ( ... )
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It was worse than that - it was APA which seemed to require the commas in a different place, or something. My tutor said at the final read-through, about a reference quoted in the body of the text, "You don't really need that comma there..." and I said was it a 'pass or fail' decider, because if not I really didn't care if I'd put a comma in the wrong place, or used the writers' initials the second time I'd credited them - as I didn't have to actually put the references on the prescription forms... and just handed it in.
So if I fail by 1% or so we'll know that is not the right attitude to it all!
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It is easier to set criteria for what is a bad factual or made-out-to-be-factual book perhaps (I suppose the latter is bad by definition). Reading joy is an elusive thing. The appeal of G R R Martin mystifies me, but a lot of people would disagree with that. And I leapt to the defence of Ursula le Guin when she was being hammered by somebody once.
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