research » Genius On Hold

Why Develop Better Research Skills

learning

Mar 052013

We looked at research back when I was covering the transdisciplinary skills, but I wanted to go back to it because research is a fundamental skill in developing and utilizing the Personal Learning Environment.

When we were kids, back when phones had to be connected to a jack in a wall to function, research consisted of spending a class period or two in the school library (and maybe a weekend in a local library). We looked for our topics in overstuffed card catalogs, and hoped no one else was grabbing the same books we needed. We used a Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature to find magazine articles, and then poured pocketfuls of dimes into copying machines so we could take the articles back to the classroom. We highlighted. We marked up. It was relatively easy to decide what was worth checking out or copying.

Relatively.

I have recently become aware that a fair number of college students follow this blog (thank you), so you’re all probably looking at this post right now feeling very sorry for my generation. But it’s actually because of you guys and the classes coming up behind you that I’ve jumped back into this topic. Today, card catalogs are the basis for DIY/upcycled storage solutions found on Pinterest. Search engines, often accessed on smartphones, have replaced that function. The problem is: A card catalog represented only those books the library had decided to acquire. Each book was carefully selected by a librarian for its validity and its usefulness. A search engine…is stuck with everything that’s ever been posted to the internet. No one has vetted most of what’s out there. Someone using only a search engine is really taking their research into their own hands. To make matters worse, you could go to a card catalog with nothing more than a vague topic and generally manage to come up with something useful, even if that useful something was just a more refined search term thanks to cross-referencing. If you’re using a search engine…good luck with that.

As the saying goes, Google can bring you back hundreds of answers, but a librarian can bring you back the right answer.

Fortunately, research is a skill, and therefore can be taught. Really, it should be taught. As I said earlier, research is a fundamental part of learning a new skill. Research is about finding information sources, deciding whether or not those sources are valid, and then pulling out the specific information needed. This relies on some of the other transdisciplinary skills (because they’re all cool and play well together), like critical thinking and multiple literacies. Research training needs to start early in a student’s education. Google has even put together a series of lesson plans to help direct teaching students how to conduct research in this digital world.

There really is no excuse why a student at any grade level can’t conduct responsible research, even if they center their research activities on a search engine.

Research Training Minimizes Embarrassment

learning

Mar 012012

It seems like a pretty straightforward statement, but research is research. Regardless of the subject, research employs the same strategies, even if the best sources are different. I point this out because I can think of five different years in my schooling where I was subjected to a “How to Conduct Research” lecture in at least three of my classes. Can you imagine sitting through three different variations of the exact same lecture roughly fifteen to twenty times? Most people don’t have the patience for it. They’ll sit for a refresher, but not for a repeat of the same full lecture.

I think it was the research lectures for an American History project late in eighth grade and a freshman Astronomy class in college that handled it the best. We were introduced to a library none of us had been in before. We were shown the preferred citation method (which beat grad school when my Collections Management professor simply said, “Of course, we will be using the professional standard”, and left it to us to figure out which one that was).

Really, students need to learn a set of basic skills for research: note-taking, citation, copyright and plagiarism, tools and resources for research, assessing the value of a source, interviewing, and observation, and then how to effectively use research to augment and strengthen their work. These can be covered in a single setting since there are many opportunities for practice throughout all the subjects.

By exposing students to research skills, maybe we can even help develop the understanding that content on the internet is valuable and protected.

Digital Pack Rat vs. Digital Curator

learning

Feb 212012

I am a trained curator. I have been taught how to analyze a collection for gaps, how to accession to fill those gaps, and how to deaccession when an artifact no longer fits within a collection. Just don’t tell that to my living space, my storage unit, the bedroom in my parents’ house filled with my stuff, or my digital notebook. Yes, even digital artifacts need curation, and it requires a special combination of skills to do artfully.

Any pack rat will tell you that no skills are needed. You find something shiny or warm, and you add it to your nest. You don’t care that you’ve long forgotten what was at the base of the nest. You collect duplicates because you don’t remember that you collected the same artifact three years ago. And you continue doing this until there’s no space for you in your own nest, which suits you just fine because you have lots of shiny, warm things. It’s easy to get lost in there, and it’s a giant rut of your own making.

Any curator will look at that shiny or warm artifact and weigh it against a series of concerns.

Collections should have a purpose, a vision. Does this artifact fit within that vision? Does it already exist somewhere within that collection? This requires a certain mindfulness and the ability to create and stick to a vision.
Collections sometimes have gaps. Does this artifact fit into that gap? Does it better fill a gap than another artifact? This requires not only an ability to research and identify useful resources, but also an ability to consider an artifact’s true worth within a collection.
Collections inform. While we do often collect because something caught our eye, we collect to learn more. More about the artifact. More about its context. More about our own perceptions of the artifact. More about how others interact with or react to the artifact. Does this artifact have something to teach? Does this artifact add something to the collection’s body of knowledge, or to an ongoing conversation? Can it spark a conversation we want to have?

In a digital world, it becomes harder to see when we’ve collected something shiny and warm and when we’ve collected something that contributes to a vision, fills a gap, and informs. We have so much digital space open to us that it’s hard to see when the nest has become overrun by pretty artifacts that aren’t particularly useful or have become outdated or outmoded. And it’s hard to move our work forward when we can’t access the good artifacts in our collection. It’s good to go through sometimes and ask yourself where each artifact really belongs – in the collection or out where someone else can stumble upon it.