Do We Need More Bad Books?
Part of The Alchemist's
Lair Web Site
Maintained by Harry E. Pence, Professor of Chemistry, SUNY Oneonta, for
the use of his students. Any opinions are totally coincidental and have
no official endorsem
ent, including the people who sign my pay checks. Comments
and suggestions are welcome (pencehe@oneonta.edu).
Last Revised March 17, 1999
Many years ago, one of my colleagues tried to convince me that we should
have more "bad" books in the library. He
argued that once our
students graduated they would encounter books and articles written by fools
and charlatans, and it was our educational responsibility to teach
them how to recognize this material. At the time, his idea seemed unreasonable,
but recently as I have watched my students use the World Wide Web and the
internet, I'm beginning to see his point.
When most reference materials were hardcopy, the only people who could publish
were those who convinced an established publisher to a
ccept their work or
those who could afford to publish on their own. A researcher could avoid
most false or biased material by using journals
and books from recognized companies. Now the Web has made everyone a potential
reference source, just as desktop publishing made everyone a publisher.
On the Web, carefully researched material from reputable organizations may
be only a few links away from reports of Elvis
sightings or bizarre conspiracy theories.
The Web has many ways to ensnare a
student researcher. Some Web pages, called
cobweb sites, may have been valid when written but have never been revised
and are now out of date. Students may reference sites that suffer from link
rot, that is, shortly after a student uses the site it
may vanish or move to a new address. Perhaps most disconcerting, by the
time a faculty member checks the site, the page may be replaced with material
that totally contradicts the original.
Faculty have traditionally counted on librarians to insure the val
idity
of information available to students. The World Wide Web and the internet
have grown with little input from these information specialists, and librarians
are now in a desperate race to catch up. Until they do,
faculty members must inform themselves about these new information sources
and develop effective policies that will help students learn to distinguish
between what is valid and what is not.
There are several initial steps that faculty can take to teach students
how to use the We
b more effectively. Faculty must teach about the approved
methods for citing electronic references, (see, for example, http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/mla.html).
In addition to teaching
proper citation style, faculty should also urge their students to be aware
of how recently the site was last revised and what biases may be held by
the organization or individual responsible for maintaining the site. Of
course, any site that doesn't provide this information should be taken with
a large grain of cyb
ersalt. To provide a check for web references, faculty
may wish to require that a specific fraction, perhaps 50%, of the references
cited in student papers be from hardcopy sources.
This is not a case where faculty have an option to decide whether or not
they wish to use the new technology. It is not acceptable to refuse to allow
students to use the most exciting new information source since the development
of printing nor is it possible to ignore poor research
technique. Faculty must t
each students techniques for evaluating and using
information. That is, after all, one of our responsibilities. As my colleague
argued, unless we teach students to recognize bad books and bad information,
we aren't preparing them for the real world.
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