EDUCATION: STUDY HABITS AND SKILLS :
EDUCATION TEACHING AND TEACHERS:
METHODS STYLES APPROACH :
RESEARCH: TECHNIQUES :
OPINION:
Your Bibliography Must Have Twenty Scholarly Sources and
You Can Only Use Print Publications
Think of Popeye.
Popeye the Sailor
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye>
Popeye has reached that point of exasperation in which he is reaching for
his can of spinach.
Spinach
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinach>
CONTENTS GUIDE BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Rogets II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition. 1995.
Bartleby Project
exasperation
<http://www.bartleby.com/62/62/E0556200.html>
This is my situation as I finally read one too many of the comments made
by professors about not allowing their students in research assignments
that require them to use scholarly sources to use any online or internet
sources in their term papers. I will include my response to such a post
on a discussion group in this post. Here are some additional points that
I wish to share about this kind of assignment.
The internet is a highway, kind of like the roads one uses to get to a
library or a shopping center. All kinds of places are found along roads
including schools, museums, libraries, homes, businesses, prisons, and
liquor stores to name a few. Using the road does not mean by definition
that one is shopping at the liquor store. Using the internet does not
mean that one is using scurulous or inferior resources by definition.
More importantly, failure to teach online as well as print research
sources is an excellent way of continuing and adding to the severity of
the digital divide by preventing the acquisition of online research skills
and discrimination in the selection of content to be used as opposed to
content to be ignored. With those thoughts in mind, here are my comments
sent in response to a professorial statement that we just do not allow
online sources without my permission in the research assignments in my
classes.
"The problem with restricting resources to online or to print as happens,
depending on the field and the professor, is that a major world of
resources is excluded from the tools or sources available to the student.
Large academic library print collections contain monographs and
periodicals that will never be made available online, perhaps or in the
distant future become available online. Some journals will not permit the
digitization of their content online, for example.
On the other hand, many libraries have limited budgets, space and
collections. To restrict student research to those collections will serve
to eliminate both the expensive online full text services bought by
libraries and consortiums for colleges as a major portion of their budget
for resources.
These sources purchased as online text collections include scholarly
services like Sciene Direct from Elsevier, JSTOR, Project Muse, Academic
Search Premier, ProQuest Direct, ABC-CLIO eBooks, ACLS History E-Book
Project, Accessible Archives, ACS (American Chemical Society) Journals,
ACM Digital Library, African American Newspapers: The 19th Century,
American Civil War Letters and Diaries, Early American Fiction 1789-1850,
Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800), Early Encounters in
North America, Early English Books Online, Early English Prose Fiction
(1500-1700), EEBO (Early English Books Online), eHRAF (Electronic Human
Relations Area Files), Grove Art Online, Harrison's Online -- Harrison's
Principles of Internal Medicine), HeinOnline fulltext legal journals,
History Cooperative Journals, History Reference Center, [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Literature Online, NetLibrary, and Oral History Online to name some. Then
there are free to all resources like the online book collection at the
University of Pennsylvania, the Guttenberg project created by Michael Hart
that has an extensive collection of full text books and other resources,
Google Books which is digitizing full text out of copyright works at major
research libraries, the Google Scholar project to name a few of the
important sources found on the internet that would be perfectly acceptable
as sources if used as print materials to professors refusing to allow
online source use or placing barriers in the way of students who seek to
use them by requiring the professor be found and asked about them.
Would it be perhaps better for the teacher to instruct students regarding
the differences between scholarly, popular and scurulous sources and make
part of their grade depend upon their ability to learn and apply this
lesson?"
I could have added many more like the Library of Congress's online
resources like their American Memories projects and the countless virtual
libraries in various subject fields and specialties, but that is just the
point. There are so many fee based online services that academic
libraries can subcribe to and so many free to all internet users projects
and information sources, that it would take forever and a day to enumerate
some of them. Thus teachers who block students from the use of online
sources categorically are contributing to the information illiteracy that
has been a serious problem and a part of the digital divide on a worldwide
scale.
Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold>
<http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ringleaders/davidd.html>
<http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html>
<http://www.LIFEofFlorida.org>
Digital Divide Network
<http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/jwne>
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/K12Admin/>
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