- Short URLs
- No Parameters/No Numbers
- Penalty FUD (lower ranking in Google because of linking to “spammy sites”)
- Momentum
- Laziness
He then says there is nothing to do about momentum and laziness and moves on to discuss the others with suggestions for people who want to be linked to. As writing teachers I think we can learn from the explicit acknowledgment of using Wikipedia to keep writing momentum going as well as being too lazy to look for other resources. It makes me think then that I need to understand that continually telling my students why “scholarly” resources are better is not going to do it! I need to demonstrate ways that they can engage with scholarly resources in a quick and easy way that doesn’t lose momentum while they are working. Let’s be honest, because we are more practiced researchers, we know how to locate scholarly resources in a more quick and efficient manner. We also know that there is nothing quite as fast as just Googling something and seeing Wikipedia in the top listing is oh-so-tempting. So how might we teach quick scholarly researching, recognizing that is what our students will be doing anyhow?
Some Ideas:
- Emphasize the various specialized Google Search Engines like Book Search, News, Finance, Scholar, and Government.
- Provide links to WWW resources that are not password protected. Things like: RefDesk, ERIC, and WorldCat.
- Demonstrating how to have multiple windows or tabs open in the browser so to easily cross reference results from Google Scholar with Library Databases.
Some Questions:
- Should we acknowledge the momentum and laziness reasons for using sources like Wikipedia and adapt are curriculum accordingly? Why or why not?
- What are some other ideas for teaching students how to speed up their “scholarly” research processes?
5 comments:
Hey Shelley,
My students complain that they are tired of their teachers telling them how much they hate Wikipedia. I tell them I don't hate it anymore than I hate Encyclopedia Britannica.
In fact, with Wikipedia, if they recognize they should, they can let their momentum drive them right on through to some of the links which often lead to more scholarly and useful resources.
So, I tell students Wikipedia is a fine place to start research, not such a good place to end.
But the research paper is still dead :)
Gill
I second Gill's comments on usefulness of wikipedia! (I don't buy Kelly's reasoning though. As a blogger I've never really been tempted to cite wikipedia, and certainly not for the look of its URLs, which I would hide behind hyperlinks.)
The issue that seems to me more complicated and controversial is the use of databases vs search engines. Many FYC teachers still seem to restrict student research to databases, but I find their search capabilities much more primitive and the sources they bring up too often too short to be useful and/or not esp. authoritative (articles from East Podunk Gazette, e.g.).
Often, I think, much richer, more credible material can be found through search engine route. I suggest students try metasearch engines such as dogpile or metacrawler to reduce no. of hits. I also suggest they try Internet Public Library or Librarian's Internet Index, but those don't usually prove as fruitful
Why not make Wikipedia itself a research assignment or project for students? Let them determine the accuracy of a section and find information that might be missing, more accurate, or contradictory?
The real Wikipedia: ANYONE can change it. I am active in a support group for people who have had children with tumors on their spines before birth. It is a very serious site, and we are very careful who gets to be a member. What we have found is that there are actually some people out there who pretend to be sick for the attention-- almost a Munshausen by Proxy thing. We had to suspend a woman's membership because she was posting suggestions that were actually dangerous to the mother and child's lives. She went to the area of Wiki that dealt with the condition and posted incorrect information and then posted that our group was a fraudulent site. It took me almost 2 months to finally get her right to post to that site removed. It is an ok place to get a quick overview, but it cannot always be trusted.
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Sorry for offtopic
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