Student: ....."Excuse me, where would I get a book?"

[SoCalDem]

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/TechNews/Internet/2004/12/07/pf-770072.html

December 16, 2004

Finding the truth online can be elusive

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK (AP) -- Go to Google, search and scroll results, click and copy. When students do research online these days, many educators worry, those are often about the only steps they take. If they can avoid a trip to the library at all, many students gladly will. Young people may know that just because information is plentiful online doesn't mean it's reliable, yet their perceptions of what's trustworthy frequently differ from their elders' -- sparking a larger debate about what constitutes truth in the Internet age.

Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project.She wasn't prepared for the response: "Someone raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?"' While the answer might just have been a smart aleck's bid for laughs, Bruckman and other educators grapple daily with the challenge of ensuring their students have good skills for discerning the truth. Professors and librarians say many come to college without any such skills, and quite a few leave without having acquired them.

Alex Halavais, professor of informatics at the University at Buffalo, said students are so accustomed to instant information that "the idea of spending an hour or two to find that good source is foreign to them."

In a study on research habits, Wellesley College researchers Panagiotis Metaxas and Leah Graham found that fewer than 2 percent of students in one Wellesley computer science class bothered to use non-Internet sources to answer all six test questions.And many students failed to check out multiple sources. For instance, 63 percent of students asked to list Microsoft Corp.'s top innovations only visited the company's Web site in search of the answer.

snip

[NJCher]

1. OMG

That's one for the books. No pun intended. I'll be telling this story tomorrow at brunch where I'm dining with two librarians.

Cher

[imenja]

2. They can't use digital information either

I can't say I'm surprised by this article. As a college professor, I frequently encounter students who have never used the library. Moreover, most of them don't know how to retrieve useful and reliable digital information either. They don't know how to use the university's databases or evaluate websites to determine if they are reliable. Even after spending two hours this semester instructing students on this sort of thing, I got all kinds of odd sources in their term papers. Joe Schmo posts his own site on the Civil War, slavery, or some other historical subject, and it ends up being used in term papers. I even had a student who cited a white supremacist website in his midterm in a comparative slavery course. I don't think he knew what he was looking at. Nothing surprises me anymore.

[skooooo]

4. Flunk 'em...

That's ridiculous. There are so many misconceptions about the Internet and the information that's available freely. Basically the old adage is true - you get what you pay for. Students today have an incredible amount of good online information available from library databases - subscription databases which can cost up to $50,000+ a year. There's no excuse to use unprofessional web sites. It's just a sad state the people are so uninformed.

[SoCalDem]

7. The young people (lots of them) have been "Fox-i-tized"

All information is given "equal weight", whether it's a website where some nutso postulates that Venus is made of pecan shells, and a NASA site/.. If it's in "print", there are always some dunces who will believe just about anything..

Parents and teachers are missing the boat when they do not teach YOUNG kids how to discern CRAP from real information..

When my kids were little they loved to read the paper, so I would cut articles out, and put them beside their breakfast, and have them read their article at the table...Then I would highlight the "code" words, and edit the story..It often was very different that what they thought it said.. (We have a rightwing paper here)..



We did the same with commercials and ads..ALL of my kids are savvy consumers, democrats and are very hard to fool.:)

[Lisa]

3. no kidding

I just finished marking a batch of papers (two batches, actually). Of the first-years, more than half used only online sources -- which wouldn't be that bad, except that most of them were BAD sources. I'd also asked them to go across the quad to the library and look at the actual newspapers and magazines. Either they forgot or they just couldn't be bothered.

The 3rd-years were a bit better about using books and journals, but I still had an awful lot of people asking me how they would go about finding stuff in the library, even though they (in theory) had a full library orientation just last year.

[China_cat]

5. Students aren't the only ones

I asked at the library not long ago where I'd find Sophocles and got a blank stare from the librarian...who then asked me to spell it for her. She had absolutely NO idea of what I was talking about.

(The library at the time was switching over from paper card catalog to digital and the librarians were the only ones with access.)

[NJCher]

8. prob'ly a clerk

A real librarian would know.

Cher

[China_cat]

11. Nope, not a clerk

A REAL librarian. She has since been moved up to head librarian of that branch.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. Microsoft Corp.'s top innovations

I can't name any.

[theorist]

9. I graduated from college in 2003.

I must have missed the wave because I wasn't allowed to use any online sources for any of my papers. Maybe it was the quality of the school? I have no idea. I remember sitting in the library late at night, trudging through scholarly work after scholarly work. These kids probably wouldn't even know how to use an index.

[imenja]

12. These days prohibiting digital sources isn't wise

And yes, things have changed quite a bit in the last few years. Some college faculty are very resistant to technological change, but I don't think it serves our students to prohibit using such sources. The world of information is changing rapidly, and I believe professors have an obligation to help students learn to evaluate new information sources. I generally tell students not to use sources from the world wide web unless it's posted on a university or archive website. Obviously, however, they don't always listen.
The quality of the university and the library in particular does play a role. In my case, it would be impossible to have students do primary research including only documents physically housed in the library because I'm at a branch campus of a state university. If your school had a quality research library--and here I don't just mean books--that's a real advantage, but I expect younger faculty are teaching with digital materials in the better funded schools as well.
There are a tremendous number of historical documents on-line now, though primarily in US history. The National Archives and the Library of Congress has scanned some of them which are available through free access. Most databases are by subscription only. Libraries don't even buy hard copies of the old indexes (America History and Life, Hispanic American Periodicals Index, etc...). Those are all digitalized now, and so much easier to use. The time saved is phenomenal. Disciplines that deal with more current material, rather than historical documents, enjoy even greater advantages from the digital revolution.

[NuttyFluffers]

10. the cultivation of stupidity...

oh well, it was nice knowing america... we won't see prosperity for generations now, it seems.

modern age makes it seem that to wallow in ignorance is a joy. lamentable.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. I was editing a textbook a couple of years ago, including the

instructor's manual, which was written by someone other than the author.

The manual was intended to be a compendium of suggestions for classroom activities and means of teaching the students Japanese culture.

The author of the teacher's manual not only suggested assigning the students to create visual aids for classroom use (Excuse me, what is the instructor being paid for? Besides, what if the student is working full time and has household responsibilities?), but also continually suggested having the students "surf the Net" to find out information about Japanese culture.

I changed the parts that said things like, "Have the students find pictures of food in magazines" to "Look for pictures of food in magazines." I also changed the part about having the students "surf the Net" to "Draw up a list of reputable books about Japan with the help of your school's librarian."

When I went to Japan in 2002, I started participating in the Lonely Planet discussion boards. It was really irritating to see person after person (sometimes once per page) post a message that said, "What is there to see and do in Japan?"

Uhh...It's a country the size of California with half the population of the U.S. There is so much to see and do that I have not exhausted its possibilities in 27 years. I don't know what you're interested in, how much time you have, or how much money you have.

My answer was always the same, "Buy one of the dozen or so available guidebooks for Japan, read it, and then come back with questions that the guidebook doesn't answer."

On one such occasion, the questioner (obviously someone who never remembered to take his homework to school unless his mommy reminded him) started flaming me for being "mean." Then other questioners started piling on. Why should the OP have to do all that reading if he could get the answers from the website?

Sigh!

[NJCher]

14. horrifying

Standards have sunk so low.

I can barely imagine asking students to surf the Web to find cultural information about Japan! Lame.

I had brunch with two librarians today and there is no way they would react that way to an inquiry about Sophocles.


Cher