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W I R E D
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George Sheridan’s class uses new and traditional media to study the European Union.
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“To google or not to google?” That is the question.
Or rather it was.
A quick web search for that phrase returned at least five hits. A clever lead bamgoogled again.
Still, all fun and googles aside, the ubiquitous search engine does demand to be reckoned with—and, even in academics, the question still applies.
How are instructors and librarians managing to guide young researchers in a world of “too much” information?
To some extent, the younger generation’s familiarity with the world of search engines and search results should make the job easier. And it does. But the advantages are balanced with some new challenges.
While wired students may know how to quickly retrieve information from the web, it’s not always the best information, or even good information. Information literacy projects at the UO are teaching students to tell the difference.
Some arts and sciences faculty members go one step further in responding to the needs of a wired student populace. They are utilizing students’ conversance in—and, in many cases, preference for—all things tech by integrating web-based course work into their curriculum.
Conducting Research Online
Bitty Roy teaches Biology 131, a nonmajors science class. Each year, she wants her students to be able to apply the basic principles of evolutionary biology to a topic that interests them by researching and writing a scientific paper.
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How well are students deciphering good information from bad?
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Of course, she wants to teach them to write well. However, there’s another teaching objective for Roy: information literacy.
“At some time in their lives, each of my students will need to understand a scientific issue or a medical problem,” says Roy. “I think it is part of basic literacy to be able to use science references and to understand the difference between peer-reviewed scientific research papers and websites that any yahoo can build.”
These distinctions are a major— and valid—concern of most professors assigning research projects.
“Right now, many students resort to what they know, which is the web, a search engine,” says Colleen Bell, Library Instruction Coordinator. “And right now the web doesn’t always lead them to scholarly resources, which is what many of the faculty expect to see in bibliographies.”
But Bell acknowledges that having access to more than 3,000 libraries online can be overwhelming to new UO students. Her own college experience was “pretty clear cut” by comparison: the research options were card catalogs or print indexes.
All indexes are now online, yet many freshman and sophomores don’t know where they are, or even what they are. And, though the catalogs are significantly vaster and more complex, the mere fact that they’re online can often make them less intimidating to the student novice. “If we’re talking about periodical indexes and a student is looking at us blankly, we can say: ‘it’s basically a search engine for articles,’” explains Bell.
However, even when students are trained in how to find good information for academic papers, many of them still fall back on the basics, the simple box in the middle of the screen.
“The reality is that when you do a search in Google you’re guaranteed to get hits,” says Bell. “Whether they’re good results or not is another issue all together. Students find ‘success’ immediately.”
Lise Nelson recognizes that many of the freshman and sophomores in her Geography of Latin America class are intimidated by the library, which is why she incorporates a short information training and research assignment into her syllabus. “It’s important for students to be learning and negotiating and discerning good information from bad. And I think practicing is invaluable...”
Bell was the librarian who assisted Nelson’s class in their research process. “I was focusing on how to find the information; [Lise] was focusing on why it was important . . . I can teach them the skills, but I can’t teach them to think like a geographer.”
Bell says the collaborative effort between instructor and librarian gives students a well-rounded approach to information-seeking in academia. George Sheridan, associate professor of history, and Tom Stave in the library’s Documents Center provide another model. Together, they’ve created an innovative course that examines the history of the European Union—even as it’s being made.
Stave has been thrilled with the opportunity to work with Sheridan and his students on this project, particularly since the Knight Library has been a European Union depository since 1965. “[The collection] just needed a core of students to sort of open it up,” he says.
Stave’s extensive knowledge of EU resources has been invaluable, especially since one of Professor Sheridan’s goals in the course is to expose young historians to research using primary sources, which range from EU legislative documents to internal market scoreboard reports. As opposed to finding an article that already opines about a policy, Sheridan encourages students to find the actual documents that embody the policy, and learn to decipher their information and meaning.
Amazingly, one finds much of this, too, available online. Each week, the EURO 410 listserv suggests new or developing research sources, such as the Eurobarometer, which reports on public opinion surveys of EU countries.
Last winter, the first time the course was offered, Sheridan and Stave asked students to write one-page descriptions of their research process in addition to their bibliographies.
“It really gave us a window into students’ minds and processes,” says Stave. “Where did they start? Where did that lead them?”
When asked how many started with Google, he smiles and shrugs, good-naturedly: “Everybody loves Google.”
Conducting Classes Online
In the Department of Exercise and Movement Science (soon to become the Department of Human Physiology), Rick Troxel has been making plans to teach the fourth hour of his four-unit spring term course online. This means that students in Physiology of Injury and Trauma will be able to access some of their lectures at home, at any time they choose.
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Online and in class, Rick Troxel balances the high tech with the human.
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The flexibility in timing is a bonus for students, but it also provides Troxel with a new opportunity to open the podium to others: he’ll be utilizing a repository of health experts, local physicians, and visiting scholars whose busy schedules would otherwise preclude them from being able to teach a class.
Troxel isn’t the only professor who is finding that online teaching and learning can present new possibilities in the classroom. Several online courses will be offered in arts and sciences this spring: The Birth and Death of Stars; Micro and Macro Economics; The Structure of English Words; US Politics; Fossil Records; and Oceanography show the range of course content being taught online.
Using the Virage software application, Troxel’s online lectures will show video of the instructor presenting side-by-side with PowerPoint slides of his key points. The video files will also be searchable on the course website by keyword, allowing students to review for exams by replaying targeted lecture clips.
A benefit of holding exam reviews and lectures online, Troxel predicts, is that class time will be under less pressure and discussions can therefore be more student-directed. “I never have enough time in a term to cover everything I want to cover,” he says, “but I don’t want to stifle class discussion. I don’t want to stop talk on something students are clearly interested in just to stay on track.”
Troxel calls himself both a tech geek and a dinosaur; he’s come a long way with using technology in the classroom since he began teaching at the UO in 1983. He would also readily admit to being one of the department’s “tech-vangelists,” frequently encouraging others in his department to explore new media and approach their own technological learning curves.
“It can be daunting,” he says. “There’s a lot to learn, and a lot of prep work.”
But the Department of Exercise and Movement Science is starting to see the possibilities. All fall and winter lectures of Human Anatomy and Human Physiology were transmitted in real time to students at the OUS Bend campus. In addition, the department is working to refine an html web-based laboratory experience to be utilized by both distance education students and students in Eugene.
These computer interfaces reproduce data as if students were actually running the experiments. They can manipulate the variables and, in a sense, work with “real time organisms,” says Troxel.
This enhances distance education possibilities but it also makes actual lab sessions more effective for local students by allowing them to run preparatory sessions before they actually get into the lab.
“Again, students can access this prep session at anytime,” says Troxel, “and of course we can track whether they’re accessing it, too... In many ways, students prefer working with the material in this way.”
Students are increasingly unresponsive to a simple audio-lecture, according to Troxel. However, he sees a clear danger in accommodating the student demand for visual and interactive technology too much: “You have to keep in perspective that the purpose of education is not merely to entertain, but to inform, and to educate.”
For this reason, Troxel remains committed to the benefits of traditional teaching and research. “Students need to learn to sit in the library with a book or a journal, too,” he says. And, he adds, the face-to-face interaction between students and faculty is still something that can’t be replicated online.
“Anyone who teaches knows that the special moments in the classroom are largely serendipitous and unexpected,” he says. Troxel knows that he gets important nonverbal feedback in class about whether his students are actually grasping the material. “The a-ha! moments people get in lecture occur mostly when I’m explaining something in response to someone’s question.”
So, while Troxel delights in his new toys in the lab and lecture room—which include a virtual chalkboard and a touch screen program that enables him to make his fingers act as virtual colored markers—he recognizes that technology is only a tool to help the real teaching happen.
“We need to be vigilant that we don’t become so enamored with tech that we forget why we’re here.”
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2004 University of Oregon
Updated June 22, 2004
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