A University professor has made a successful bid for media coverage of a standard lecture by insulting Google. Google is “white bread for the mind”, according to Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Brighton, arguing that teachers should equip students with skills to process Internet information.
(She teaches Media Studies. Isn’t that supposed to be HER job?)
She believes that easy access to information has dulled students’ sense of curiosity and is stifling debate. She claims that many undergraduates arrive at university unable to discriminate between anecdotal and unsubstantiated material posted on the internet. ……
We can no longer assume that students arrive at university, knowing what to read and knowing what standards are required of the material that they do read.”
“knowing what to read?” Well what should you read? What your teachers have told you?
Whole chunks of all education operate through teachers implicitly saying “Learn these facts. Because I say so.” Few teachers reward a challenging response from their students. “Challenging” has even become a euphemism for “irritating, dangerous, pain in the arse” in teacher- and social worker-speak.
The Internet opens up access to new potential information sources. Lots of teachers don’t like this precisely because their models of how to evaluate information are derived from accepting what they read in textbooks.
It’s not Google that panics University teachers. Anyone who can get any relevant information out of Google nowadays is probably already the best in their classes. It’s really Wikipedia. that annoys Universities Oh yes, here it is, in the Prof’s speech.
“Students live in an age of information, but what they lack is correct information. They turn to Wikipedia unquestioningly for information. Why wouldn’t they – it’s there,” she said.
Yes, indeed why wouldn’t they? It’s more factually correct than standard encyclopedias. It’s totally accessible. That’s what disturbs some teachers. (Including, I assume the Prof, unless she really is serious about teaching critical thinking….. In which case, Go Prof! Go Prof! etc)
Many are training their students for an imaginary academic career, as it would have been thirty years ago. They feel that students are workshy unless they put in the physical effort to search in libraries, pay large sums for course books and compete with other students for access to obscure library journals. Are these activities assumed to be “educational” by their very nature, just because the lecturers had to do them when they were students? Now, we have instant access to material from all over the world. Finding it quickly, judging its value and how it relates to other bits of information are the skills we need now.
Shouldn’t teachers reward students more for showing “thinking and questioning” skills than for proving they’ve read the text books and memorised a set of “facts”?
Accepted and memorised knowledge is crucial in some topics at some levels. (You can’t come up with alternate versions of the laws of thermodynamics or invent your own French word for ‘pen’) It is completely misguided in other subjects.
Inability to evaluate information isn’t just a problem for University students or for Internet sources. We are all pretty bad at it.
School students need to be specifically encouraged to dispute the sources and content of information, including the books they have been told to read. Training people to accept authority without questioning it encourages people to accept the words of ministers, priests, imams, kool-aid distributors, politicians, press, television, Fox news, gossip magazines, Answers in Genesis, Holy Books x,y & z, psychic detectives, fake nutritionists, fake childcare experts, wifi-cure salespeople and a bazillion other sources of bullcrap.
Right on point as usual, Heather. You go, girl!
I hate to say it, but you’ve got things exactly backwards. The professor in question is not encouraging students to blindly accept textbooks. They are complaining that students blindly accept whatever they find online, which is arguably worse. (Textbooks — outside of Texas, anyway — usually have at least some minimal truth in them.)
This particular plaint — that students are unable to judge information — has been made many times over the last decade or so; the only thing new is that this particular person is saying it.
To take your points one by one:
— “She teaches media studies. Isn’t that HER job?”
The ability to compare the relative worth of sources of information is a very basic skill. It’s on a par with trigonometry. If a college-level math professor had to teach student trigonometry, it would be a waste of time, and you would rightly condemn the system which failed to teach high school students the subject.
— “Lots of teachers don’t like this precisely because their models of how to evaluate information are derived from accepting what they read in textbooks.”
More teachers (and librarians, and scientists) don’t like this because students are not taught — and have failed to learn — how to tell a good website from a bad one. If you look online, you will find, aside from parodies (which can be hard to spot if you don’t know the subject), sites devoted to deliberately stating untruths. There are sites from climate change deniers (inevitably not people who have studied climatology or biology), Holocaust deniers (inevitably not serious historians), evolution deniers (inevitably not biologists), and all sorts of hate groups. The problem teachers have is not with students having access to these things — traditionally, it has been academics who have led the fight against censorship — but that students are unable to sense bias, sound argument, and lack of authority.
There are ways to evaluate the probably validity of a website, but they aren’t being taught, or aren’t being used.
— “[Wikipedia is] more factually correct than standard encyclopedias. It’s totally accessible.”
There are a number of problems with Wikipedia as a research tool. The two main ones:
1. On Wikipedia, an expert with a career’s worth of knowledge has no more standing on their subject than anybody else. This means that people with less-than-honest motives can edit articles to insert their own biases. These edits can be rolled back — but this puts the Wikipedia moderators in the position of being just as potentially censorious as you claim teachers are.
2. Wikipedia articles can change substantially without any sign that they have changed. What if your student happens to do research on economics in the half-hour when an anti-semite has edited a main article to talk about the “International Conspiracy of Bankers”? Sure, they’ll be able to cite the change log, but if they had instead consulted reference books — or even just more stable websites from actual authorities — they would get better answers right from the beginning.
Even Wikipedians themselves have admitted that Wikipedia is less-than-stellar. Consider, for example, this article[note: link removed by TW] in The Register. (Admittedly, it’s a couple of years old now, but there have been other admissions more recently.)
There are movements afoot to correct these problems within Wikipedia, but so far these measures — notably deleting “non-notable” entries and requiring citations — have failed to solve the quality problems while making Wikipedia substantially less useful for non-academics.
— “Shouldn’t teachers reward students more for showing “thinking and questioning†skills than for proving they’ve read the text books and memorised a set of “factsâ€?”
They should, but reading a webpage and accepting it uncritically as truth is not “thinking and questioning”. Particularly if you do it exclusively in lieu of reading books, which has become quite common.
— “School students need to be specifically encouraged to dispute the sources and content of information, including the books they have been told to read.”
How about including the websites we have not been told to read? That’s what the professor is asking for.
Beautifully written! I have nothing more to add to this. This ought to be read by all of the profs at my university.
Just curious, here: did my comment actually get eaten, or is it being held for moderation? There’s nothing there to say one way or the other.
Since I’m a thinker and a questioner, as well as a Lookie, I thought I’d better check out both my print dictionary and Wikipedia for bazillion and bullcrap.
My print dictionary had no entries for either word. But Wikipedia was really in its glory:
Imaginary words ending in the sound “-illion”, such as zillion[1] and bazillion[2], are often used as fictitious names for an unspecified, large number, by analogy to names of large numbers such as billion and trillion. Their size is dependent upon the context, but can typically be considered large enough to be unfathomable by the average human mind. AND Bullshit (often bowdlerized to BS, or occasionally Bovine Scat), also Bullcrap, is a common English expletive. It can also be shortened to just “Bull”.
So there you have it. Take that, University Professors.
Now, my comment is awaiting moderation.
Here’s Wiki again: Moderation is the period of time that elapses between your posting a comment and heather’s actually reading it and approving it. Occasionally, moderation will take place effectively, in which case your comment will actually appear as a comment, albeit several moments, hours, or days later. In many cases, however, comments disappear into the ether during moderation, and will suddenly reappear on completed unrelated posts at total strangers’ blogs or, even worse, as spam going to the Pentagon or MI5. Occasionally, but not often, a prolonged period of moderation can lead to a bazillion comments all containing the same bullcrap.
Vicar: Sorry about your comment. For some reason comments which include hyperlinks have about a 50:50 chance of displaying and we have never got to the bottom of what causes it.
The hyperlink I removed from your quote was: theregister.co.uk/2005/10/ 18/ wikipedia_quality_problem – very useful and thank you for pointing it out to us, but for some reason if I leave the URL intact (or try to hyperlink to it), the post displays no text. I have no idea what is doing this.
Exterminator – I have no idea why Akismet decided your comment needed to await moderation but I have now pulled it out of the moderation queue.
Generally speaking we try to keep the anti-spam measures to a minimum here, I’d rather have one or two spams get through than loads of people waiting to have their comment approved – however it seems that sometimes the software takes things into its own hands and decides who gets to comment and who has to wait. As soon as we work out what is causing this, we will try to address it.
All::
Thanks for the thoughtful and witty comments.
Vicar:
I didn’t mean to imply that uncritical use of internet sources was OK. I meant that challengng the authority of text books was as important as challenging internet sources.
My argument was with the professor as a representative of the common university approach that treats old media as “legit” and new media as being ” too easy.”
I know students from 2 UK universities who are told that a Wikipedia citation brings an automatic failure on a paper.
(No matter how they’ve used the information. … No matter what its source…. No matter the quality of their piece. The canny ones just follow the Wiki hyperlinks to the sources and use them. There are no rules to enforce how uncritically they use these sources. Even a student who used the Encyclopedia Britannica as their only source would not get their paper automatically marked as 0. Nor would a student who just took a set book as true authority.)
(Yeah, yeah, I know… anecdote is not evidence. )
Your say that, in Wiki, years of expertise are valued no more than a n00b’s ideas. I agree. It’s also pretty well the way our governments work now, in any case. You give the example of nonsense in Wiki that could get repeated.
However, that’s what ‘m saying really. Much formal education rewards repeating what you’ve read where it is inappropriate (as in your economics example. If the same garbage was in a book, it would still be garbage). This is anti-knowledge, whatever your sources are.
Analytical skills and scepticism don’t guarantee that you won’t be misled but, at least they leave room for correction.
Wikipedia is falsifiable. Anyone can challenge what others have written. This lets it function pretty well without much moderation.
I like to think that an essential part of our job at the university level involves teaching students not just where to find information but how to think critically about the information they do find. If the understand the scientific method and how to apply it, they are often well-prepared to critically evaluate the information they encounter. The problem is that many students find methodology irrelevant and simply want to be told what to think. Sadly, there are many who are all too willing to tell them.
Wrong. Challenging Internet sources is slightly more important, because of the issue of anonymity.
A textbook represents at the very least the statement “we believe the things in this book to be true, and are willing to stake our reputations on it”. The Internet (and Wikipedia in particular) do not have even this level of guarantee. When it comes to informational sites, only a relative handful are not effectively anonymous. You can’t be sure that an author’s name on a website is a real name. You can’t even be sure that the registration of a DNS record contains a real name — aside from the various anonymizing systems out there, I know of at least one person who owns a domain name which returns outright false information via whois. Establishing the identity of an author is step 1 in establishing the credibility of a source, even when other routes exist, and it just can’t be done reliably on the Internet, except on sites which function more or less identically to print media, such as peer-reviewed science sites.
Wikipedia suffers from this effect more than much of the rest of the Internet. Quite aside from the anonymity of its contributors, its editors have repeatedly been caught falsifying information to a greater or lesser extent. Google “Essjay Ryan Jordan” for the most prominent instance, but there have been other troubling cases. (I’m not getting caught in the link == held for moderator trap again!) (Even founder Jimbo Wales isn’t immune from doing questionable things — Google “Jimbo birthday Wikipedia” to see the rather odd story about how he contradicted himself, then started abusing his editor privileges to make the earlier statements disappear. Admittedly, the subject of the date of his birthday is unlikely to ever have importance, but it’s worrisome that such a case would even exist.)
Good. This is a relatively coherent policy. (Not the “no matter how uncritically they use these sources” part; the “Wikipedia citation == automatic failure on a paper”.) Particularly if they are warned, although I would hope that anyone attending college/university would already know not to do this.
Given Wikipedia’s anonymity problems, a Wikipedia citation is almost exactly equivalent to “somebody told me at a party, and they may or may not have represented other people whose identities I don’t know”. We don’t know the someone’s name, we don’t even know what kind of party. Yes, it could have been a professional expert attending that party, who could back up their statement with all sorts of evidence if given the chance. But it could also have been a sober-looking drunk playing a joke, or a genuine crackpot, or a marketing shill planting false information to influence sales, or anything at all, really. Examining Wikipedia’s sources is the only way to establish the credibility of any of its entries in an academic context, and one of the rules of citation is that you always cite the more original source you can. Wikipedia drops out.
A better policy would be “automatic failure for the use of a website without providing proof of credible authorship”, but banning direct citations of Wikipedia is a good first step.
While I have a different opinion than heather regarding the use of Wikipedia as a source of knowledge, I cant say I agree with the blanket disregard of this source put forward by some people.
I will leave heather to address the brunt of the points made here, but one stands out.
I dont agree at all. Asserting it is wrong simply because internet sources are anonymous is, simply put wrong.
In an ideal world, all sources of educational information would be heavily peer reviewed and be written by well verified authors. The fact remains, however, that lots of printed material is ghost written, vanity press garbage or worse. Giving printed material extra credibility simply because it is solid and in your hands is a massive mistake to make. For example, an entry in the printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica should not be considered 100% accurate – publisher and author bias has to be considered, let alone simple factual mistakes.
While there are problems with using the internet in general, and wiki in particular, as a source – used properly this is surely something a capable teacher should overcome. Yes, there are certainly topics which fall foul to unscrupulous or misinformed edits, there are also a lot of topics which are as factual and accurate as any other encyclopaedia. Teaching students to read and assess all their sources of information in a critical and sceptical manner is a good thing – this is achieved allowing them to use wikipedia and learn how to spot mistakes and bias, surely?
If the tutor allowed the use of Wikipedia, but put the effort in to highlight when people made mistakes as a result of using biased or inaccurate information this would teach the students a lot more than simply demanding they use printed materials to reduce the “cut and paste” effect – I mean, most people have scanners and OCR software anyway…
(Sorry, I wanted to address another point after all 🙂 )
I think both of these are unnecessary and potentially counter productive.
Depending on the topic, “credible authorship” is meaningless – unless the student is trying to say something wrong on the basis that “educated person X” said it first, the exact author is not always important.
Quite often, in both printed media and on the internet, I have come across articles by people who are far from experts in the field they are writing about but are experts (or at least “famous”) in other, sometimes unrelated fields. Now, if I reference them does having proof of who actually wrote it give any extra weight to what they have said?
If it doesn’t (and I dont think it does), how has proving their credible authorship changed anything?
Um, I wasn’t saying “all printed material”, I was talking specifically about textbooks, because the assertion was that challenging textbooks was as important as challenging websites. Textbooks are seldom ghost-written or vanity publications. (And the “seldom” is there because there may be examples out there. I have yet to encounter one.)
If you have discovered the author but they turn out not to be an expert, then you have established authorship but not credibility.
I was at Tara recent inaugural lecture at the University of Brighton and taped the lecture (6.5 MB WMA file). You can find the link at http://www.mediafire.com/?9zrmdyml1ze
Regards
Michael
heather, i couldnt agree with you more.
the reason why site like wiki are an automatic fail is simply lazy, lazy tutors. if we are talking about university students, then let them use any and all sources. if we teach them to blindy accept textbooks what have they really learned?
i agree with HS students it might be a different story, but even then what teacher actually sits through 30 papers and verifies every single reference to make sure they are acceptable…
Excellent post, Heather, as in it’s application to those of us who post about issues of rational thinking. These are the type of important topics we should be dissecting.
Certainly there is a lot of crap on the Internet. And certainly any information you get (even from a fairly reliable source, like Wikipedia) should be cross-checked against other known and widely accepted provenances. But having information at our fingertips is not a negative! I think the problem you are defining here might have a lot to do with a generational transition. Us older people need to keep educating ourselves as well.
Congratulations on a well-deserved Stermy Award.