Things I hear from professors about why their assignments don't work

The first in a series of "the things I hear from professors about why their assignments don't work":

Students are asked to generate ideas for a paper as a group. They don't have good ideas and they immediately go online to look for some. This frustrates the professor.

Students are asked to write a personal narrative. They go online and plagiarize someone else's personal narrative. Wierd, right?

Hands-on

I don't want to forget this when I'm planning workshops for the fall:

Have some workshops designated as hands-on and participatory. These would be offered later in the semester and would expect students to have a topic selected so that they have something to research. Maybe they'd even have to fill out a research planning sheet before signing up. After a very brief demo, the students would be on the computers. This could be better than having students at varying levels trying to work hands-on from a canned activity. Knowing when the hands-on classes would be, we could have an additional librarian or maybe a student worker available to help with tech problems.

Toulmin

I want to get the Toulmin Model into my LIB 2 course to have students map out the evidence they'd need to support the inquiry they're proposing for their research bibliographies. I'm tired of just getting general summaries about the sources they select and this could give them something to say. I also want to add the requirement that students delineate and defend their research process as part of the final project. Now the question is how to scaffold that during the course.

What's lost?

I finally read an article I've been meaning to get around to for months. I'd hoped it would lead me deeper in my interest about the differences between experiencing research as the physical process of moving through a library and the visual process of scanning computer screens and following links. Perhaps the intellectual process is the same whether the research is done physically or visually, but maybe it's not.

This article I read was only about the way that layouts can be broken up in databases and typographical context can be lost. I'm interested, instead, in research about other information tasks that were physical and are now visual, like medical record keeping, and what might be lost after the transition. There are cues inherent in the physical embodiment of information that have not been made part of its visual representation in electronic formats. Is it harder, as I believe it is, to learn a research process that requires searchers to be aware of the types of sources they're using now that everything's flattened? How do we teach students that there are limits to the information they'll get from the websites they're most likely to find when we can only point to an electronic article or book that looks exactly the same and that they won't be able to distinguish until they actually read it? And when they read it (the article or the book) it's so much harder to process and understand than their usual websites that they give up and don't have a framework to understand what they've missed the way a framework gave context and cues to students in the past when books were separated from journals were separated from pamphlets were separated from magazines were separated from newspapers.

When you had to walk to your next source and hold it in your hands, it was hard to ignore the differences and, perhaps, easier to internalize a hierarchy of information that would make it easier to make decisions about where to go at each stage in the research process. And also how to find our way out of a maze of information if we kept chasing citations. Links from links may mimic the way our minds work but they don't do anything to help us get our thoughts more organized and our natural inclinations in check so that our reasoning on a subject can develop deliberately. The artificial distinctions were a ladder into and out of a subject so that we didn't have to find all of our own toe holds. Can we build something back in to give this guidance? Or, and this seems more likely, has this element of college research faded for good? If it's faded, what do students need from us now?

Here's an article I might track down:

"Full-Text Database Dependency: An Emerging Trend Among Undergraduate Library Users?" by McDonald and Dunkelberger in Research Strategies 16.4 (1998): 301-307.

The Self Authoring Mind Doesn't Feel Good, So What Good is It?

There's been a lot of talk about this being the stupidest generation. I think it's true that the difference between this generation of young people and previous generations may be over stated. My concern is that the true difference will be manifest when the current population of young people reach adult hood but a smaller proportion of the population than ever before makes the transition from the Socialized Mind to the Self Authoring Mind, a stage in transformative learning that turns people from adolescents to adults.

I believe that the information technologies that promote the view that all information is only as important as the network/hive-mind deems have made it harder than ever to learn how to have an articulated world view as an individual, not beholden to past traditions or always appealing to authority in perpetual, unreflective reaffirmation of social norms. Texting, social networking, user ranking, and the general ease of selectively consuming only the information that supports one's existing prejudices may be retarding the transformation of plugged-in youth from their hyper-socialization to critical mindedness. Already there are few popular examples of adults who think like adults on which these youths can model their development and self assess their progress.

A lot of thoughtlessness may be in store for those of us who have to live in the world that these youths are building to accomodate the preferences they've developed in their extended adolescence.

Ph.D.?

Could I become a PhD student?

Here are some programs I'm interested in:

UCLA PhD in Higher Ed & Org Change
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~heoc/

UCLA PhD in Soc Sci & Comp Ed
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~ssce/

UCI PhD in Language, Literacy, and Technology
http://www.gse.uci.edu/phd_faculty_llt.php