According to IHE, Elsevier was offering people $25 gift cards for Amazon or Barnes and Noble if they would leave positive reviews of one of their textbooks on those sites. After the fake medical journal scandal, one doesn’t even have to ask. Clearly they have no shame. They only fake it when they’re found out. I wanted to write more on this, but it’s just so obviously disreputable there’s not much to say. Of course they disavow responsibility. It’s always an overzealous employee. But overzealous employees are created by the corporate culture. I could probably retire on what the top two or three research libraries pay Elsevier each year, and I’m not that old.
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Two Schools of Instruction
Fortunately that time of the year isn’t here yet, but I’m still thinking already about teaching of all kinds in the fall, including library instruction. Though there are busy times, even busy seasons, when I coast on my experience and skills, I try to be a reflective instructor when I can. A conversation with a friend the other day centered around library instruction. We were arguing about (discussing?) a couple of different schools of instruction, which I might call Kitchen Sink and Minimalist.
The names both explain themselves and hint at my own preferences. The Kitchen Sink approach wants to turn students into little librarians, though the Kitchen Sinkers would say "independent scholars." As a long term goal I have some sympathy to this approach. Within certain parameters, we should want students to become independent scholars, or maybe independent "scholars." The problem comes in the practice, and in the definition of scholar.
For example, I have seen good librarians spend 45-50 minutes explaining the intricacies of the OPAC to freshman in a composition course preparing to research a 10-page essay. I’m not sure if you’ve ever read a 10-page research essay by a freshman, but I can tell you from experience there’s just not that much an essay like that can cover. To do the research for an essay like that, freshman don’t need to know every nuance of the OPAC, or even every nuance of searching. Spending that much time on any one activity is a mistake, but I’ve seen it happen over and over.
Just at the technical level, I’ve seen the similar activities with online indexes and databases. Some librarians go through several in a session, as if there was any great difference in technique among them. For the purposes of search, a database is a database is a database.
The Kitchen Sinkers approach more theoretical applications in the same way. They want every student to come out of every one-shot with a mastery of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. I guess the thinking is, I’ve only got this one hour, I’m going to make it count!
Needless to say, I’m not a Kitchen Sinker; I’m a Minimalist. A former colleague (who hated most things about me professionally and personally, I should note) said that I should go into a BI, hand out my business card to students, and suggest they take notes on that. She meant this as a rebuke, no doubt, but it was an accurate enough description of my library instruction then and now. There’s only so much one can do in an hour (or 80 minutes, which is our typical freshman instruction session length). Even with 80 minutes, I might spend only half an hour on formal demonstration. The rest of the class I let the students start researching and I wander around consulting.
And in that half hour, I still try to minimize what I do. I certainly don’t cover every nuance of the OPAC, and typically I might demo one other database. Instead I emphasize what I call the geography of information. If you want this kind of thing, you look in this kind of place. It’s all abstract, but similar to some reference training. After all, if I know there’s such a thing as an historical atlas, I know all I really need to know about that topic to answer reference questions.
Search technique is easily enough dispensed with. I usually mention five things to do with a database:
- Search by Keyword
- Search by Subject
- Limit by date, language, etc.
- Mark the records you want to save
- Email citations/articles to yourself
How much more do students need to get started? I also discuss approaches summarized from Thomas Mann’s Library Research Methods:
- Keyword searches in online and print sources.
- Subject searches in online and print sources.
- Citation searches in printed sources.
- Searches through published bibliographies (including sets of footnotes in relevant subject documents).
- Searches through people sources (whether by verbal contact, e-mail, electronic bulletin board, letters, etc.).
- Systematic browsing, especially of full-text sources arranged in predictable subject groupings.
Again, if students master the basic theory, do they need to be completely "information literate"?
There are a couple of possible objections to my approach. First, one might say I really am trying to get the students to be little librarians. Thomas Mann? He’s the reference librarian’s reference librarian! There’s some truth to that. But what I give students in a very brief time are guidelines. I don’t attempt to reinforce them all with extensive searching in a joint demonstration. Another possible criticism is that the students don’t leave with much. It’s true. They don’t. And they don’t leave with much in other classes, either. That’s because there’s only so much students can absorb in one class. They leave with enough to get started, to solve some problems, and to build from there.
The Kitchen Sinkers are motivated (I suspect) by the crisis of time. Unlike professors in a class, librarians don’t have much time with students. (I suppose there are those semester long information literacy courses, but those aren’t very common, which might not be a bad thing.) One doesn’t learn how to research quickly or abstractly, though. It takes not only time, but practice. This is the difficulty we all face. We can try to pack everything into one session, thus ensuring not only that the students won’t learn much but that they’ll be bored in the process. Or we can hint at the complexities of research in the class and get them started, with the hope that if they need more skills later on they’ll develop them through practice. Maybe we’ll be there; maybe we won’t. But there’s nothing we can do about it in a one shot class.
Research skills are learned over time with practice, even for librarians. Would we consider a new graduate student equal to a senior professor in research knowledge in a field? No. Nor would we consider a new library school graduate equal to a very experienced reference librarian, especially one who had also done her own research.
The good news is that most students will never need to be little librarians, or even big professors. Most students will need the sort of minimal research skills necessary to navigate their way through life, which outside academia rarely requires long research projects. Most students won’t ever be real scholars, nor do they need to be. The bad news is that in a lot of schools, there’s no guarantee that as the students progress, the librarian’s help will be consistently offered or sought when needed.
But What About? and “Mere Rhetoric”
I listened to some of President Obama’s Cairo speech this morning, and based on the snippets I heard and the summary and analysis I’ve read so far it maintains his reputation as the most rhetorically effective President since Reagan, and probably since Kennedy. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University in June 1963. Kennedy’s speech wasn’t addressed to his university audience so much as to the Soviet Union, and Obama’s approach today was similar, to build bridges to the potentially hostile audience through emphasis on mutual values and goals while not denigrating American values. I recommend listening to or reading Kennedy’s address if you’re unfamiliar with it, but this is my favorite bit:
So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
I submit that it would be difficult to find a more rhetorically effective paragraph in the annals of Presidential speeches. It acknowledges differences without threat, urges common goals while recognizing that not all of them will be met, and summarizes in brief but compelling fashion the underlying joint humanity even of political enemies. President Obama’s speech today tried to make the same points.
One difference between the speeches is in the specificity of proposals. Kennedy, for example, announced that he and Krushchev would soon begin discussing a test ban treaty, and that the US wouldn’t conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere if other states also refrained from such testing. Some commentators and pundits have already begun criticizing Obama’s speech for not articulating more concrete proposals. He didn’t do this, he didn’t do that. He said he was opposed to this, but didn’t say what he would really do. Depending on the perspective, the list of things left out is long: he didn’t denounce Muslim terrorists or dictators, he didn’t articulate a clear solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he didn’t talk about civilian casualties in Pakistan. (Of course, there’s a raft of more inarticulate criticism. If you want to descend into the morass of what passes for common opinion in America, you might sample the comments here.)
The criticism that he didn’t address everything in one speech is a ridiculous one, and one that has been plaguing Obama since the beginning of his Presidential campaign. For one thing, it’s an example of what I recently saw referred to as the "but what about" fallacy. (I thought I’d read this in philosopher Jonathan Wolff’s Guardian blog, but I can’t find it there. If anyone knows the source, I’ll be happy to link to it.) The idea of the fallacy is that whatever claims, arguments, or assertions someone makes, instead of addressing them, it’s easier to evade them and just say, "but what about X topic you didn’t talk about?" That response appears to point out a flaw in the opponent’s position but is really just a variation of the red herring fallacy. "But we’re not talking about X; we’re talking about W," might be the best response.
The other major criticism that has dogged him from the beginning is that his speeches are "mere rhetoric," as if a speech is ever anything but rhetoric. Criticism of this sort is different from the "but what about" fallacy, but it’s still usually a nonsensical criticism mouthed by people who don’t understand how language works. Language is symbolic action. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, often through argumentation, and according to Chaim Perelman the “aim of argumentation is not to deduce consequences from given premises; it is rather to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent." The goal of "mere" rhetoric is to persuade, to win people to our positions, to eliminate barriers of distrust and dissent, to reduce threat because, as the psychologist Carl Rogers argued, threat hinders communication.
Rhetoric is more than just argument, the logical appeal. There are also the emotional and ethical appeals, and Obama is a master of the ethical appeal, the appeal based on character. The character manifest in this speech, and in many of his other speeches, is of a person who understands the world is a complicated place, who recognizes difference and reaches out to the "other," who presents positive values while not dismissing those he doesn’t agree with as evil or stupid, who is so strong in his own convictions that he doesn’t need to demonize the opposition through divisive rhetoric and inane catch phrases, so balanced and calm that he doesn’t feel compelled to rise to the challenge of blowhards. It’s this rhetorical appeal in particular that so many politically motivated people in America neither have nor understand. The demonstration of hatred, the obvious unwillingness to consider the positions of others, the inability to even understand difference, the incapacity for empathy or sympathy, the unrelenting hermeneutic of suspicion, the utterly obvious willingness to say or do anything to win regardless of truth or principle – all of these traits undermine the ethical appeal and yet are rife in our political culture and manifest in many of the critics of this President and his speeches.
The problem for these critics is that they just don’t know what to do with such a politician. If you’re an overweight, multiply divorced, substance abuser, it’s hard to attack the character of a healthy man in a lengthy stable marriage with two loving children. If you’re a blowhard who knows only how to manipulate social divisions and is so rhetorically challenged that you’re considered merely an evil joke by your opponents, it’s hard to smear the character of a man who quite obviously shares none of your cynicism or passion for the complete destruction of people of good will with whom you happen to disagree. Regardless of any specific problems of Obama’s policies that could be articulated, so many of his critics just seem like spoiled, screaming youngsters compared to him. A glimmer of hope for America – seen fleetingly in some Republican reactions to the nomination of Sotomayor – is that the nuanced worldview and the balanced, measured rhetoric of President Obama may by some miracle elevate the level of political discourse in the country. It’s never been particularly elevated before, but there’s always that hope.