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/> _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.