Google = white bread?

Medlar on 15/1/2008 at 11:04

Good point, I wonder what the answer is tho'? If kids get acceptable course marks from google research there is no incentive to do more.

Chade on 15/1/2008 at 22:25

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

I don't think it's a google thing, it's a lazy thing. People don't even look for anything that looks factual/official, they'll just go to Wikipedia. I've altered incorrect info on there that has just been altered back to the BS.

The people altering it back probably thought the same thing. ;)

Thief13x on 16/1/2008 at 00:27

stupidest shit i've ever heard...students don't use google they use wikipedia...I remmember one student saying that he learned more from wikipedia than his classes in four years. Simple...if its not cited it's unreliable.

And atleast here at Florida Tech, they will not even consider wikipedia a valid source. If you use i, the professor will simple count one less source than the number you actually sited, and this is made clear in every english class, to include basically every web source not from a .edu or .gov site, or not found in infotracks or some other database provided by the school. There are standards, and they are enforced appropriatly.

The key is not to use wikipedia for your material, but you wikipedia to GET to your material through its sources

Mr.WaeseL on 16/1/2008 at 12:21

Quote Posted by icemann

Its not like television or newspapers are any better of a source of true information either though

You're 100% right, a newspaper is just as bad as someone's geocities site. Great job, chief.

Vivian on 16/1/2008 at 13:42

Quote Posted by Thief13x

The key is not to use wikipedia for your material, but you wikipedia to GET to your material through its sources

You're dead right. Thats exactly what I tell my students - wikipedia can't be trusted much, but it'a great place to start the paper trail.

Tocky on 17/1/2008 at 05:10

I think sometimes teachers just want students to have the same gestalt leaps of reasoning they experienced while reading the classics in a less complicated age, the one that was the best and worst of times. At the very least they expect that leading students along the evolutionary trail writing has taken is a lesson in itself. Thier fear is that a fast food approach will merely cribb the mind without the reflection natural in the days before multitasking.

I would poo poo that but jebus fett, I sympathize about The Sound and Fury being tarded (an in joke if you read it) but Tolkien over Fitzgerald? If for no other reason than to understand the references one faces later I think everyone should suffer Hawthorn, Melville, and the like. I'm reading Dan Simmons just now and he refers to Keats rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem. I had forgotten how beautifully succinct the line "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" was.

I'm not accusing you of being full of passionate intensity but dammit how can Bachs Air for the G String not be among the five most beautiful things you've ever heard? I was all ready to say hell yeah FIGHT THE POWA DOWN WITH THE MAN and realized I AM the man. I guess I sympathize with Twain when he lamented upon hearing his works were considered classics, "a classic is something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read". Sigh. You have your own mind and it is yours.

edit: spelling- should have googled it.

Muzman on 17/1/2008 at 16:23

Quote Posted by fett

Exactly what are these 'standards' and who determines what they are? If we're talking about 'hard fact' topics with testable results (like science, chemistry, or math) then the standards are obvious - the results are testable. If we're talking about social studies, English lit, political science, religion, philosophy, and even economics (to a degree) etc., then exactly whose 'standards' must the material live up to?

She's not talking about that at all, and even in the hard sciences standards of knowledge, information and writing can slip just as easily. It's not just a question of hard facts vs subjective experience. The misunderstaning and misuse of scientific information (and regurgitation of faux scientific information) is rampant. Ask (http://www.badscience.net/) Ben Goldacre

Secondly; the standards of academic writing and criticism are pretty firmly established and stretch across all disciplines, give or take some quirks. These various fields have been around for a long time and contain numerous threads and debates, traditions and paradigms. Anyone embarking on that sort of education is going to be subject to the established discipline, or should be. Any course worth its salt will also teach you how to criticise the established traditions, but to not know they are there or to dismiss them altogether is counterproductive. The realms of Literature, Philosophy (oh hell) and the Social Sciences are no exception to this.

Quote:

My beef is specifically with academic types appointing themselves the Guardians of Sacred Knowledge and poo-pooing the ideas and opinions of the common person. Sure, most of the internet is crap, but the assertion that any education or knowledge that doesn't derive from Approved Sources is crap as well. I don't care who many times Lit teachers tried to shove Faulker and Fitzgerald down my throat as 'classics' to be revered, those authors are shit, their books are shit, and if I say so on the internet, my opinion is just as valid as that of Dr. English Lit Phd.

Don't misunderstand me - I'm not on some relativity trip here. 2+2 always =4, but the underlying tone of the academic elite that they hold the keys to the kingdom is irritating at best and dangerous at worst. Many ideas that changed the world didn't come from college campuses, but from some guy in Podunk that dared to think differently.

Yeah, but likewise to accept uncritically the views of the common person on the grounds that they are individuals with rights or something is kinda against the entire Academic project. If you (that is anyone) go to further study for anything besides getting a qualification and starting your own business or something, then that is what you're a part of. English Lit is in there too; it's a tradition of study with a developed methodology (methodologies) and theories stretching back centuries with the goal of figuring it out. Debate its validity all you like, the afore is still true. And would you have read Fitzgerald and Faulkner if he hadn't made you? And even if you disagree isn't the fact that they are revered as classics and were popular at all interesting anyway?

Quote Posted by fett

But anyone who has set foot in a college classroom will tell you that there is a virtual epidemic of academics who either don't know their topic, or have abandoned fact for opinion, or insist that theirs is the ONLY correct opinion. This is great when it come to math, languages, etc. but with the fine arts and certain other subjects, it's just arrogance.

Er, no abandoning fact for opinion in maths and languages would be disastrous.

Quote:

Same thing happened in Music History. I'm sorry, but Bach fucking sucks, and so do most of his imitators. The profs took it personally, and asserted that THESE were 'standards' - the material that is 'approved' for the course.

I just get a bad vibe when academics start raising an arbitrary standard of what's 'acceptable' material when the topic is subjective to begin with.

JS Bach sucks? Well, that's one point of view, but you probably tune your guitar the way you do because of him so his place in things is somewhat assured. If the teachers don't explain that (mine never did) well that's another story.
Really, the use of arbitrary standards is pretty fundamental to most things we encounter every day. Where options are diverse someone has to draw the line, and there'll still be arguments for and against said line which will come into play down the..er road. Any first year university course is basically all about structure and discipline in writing and knowledge on the given topic. You are subject to the traditions and standards of the institution and the fields therein. You're limited to the lessons and information they deem necessary to provide the appropriate framework for further learning in that field, and it is arrayed so by people who are, by societies general definition, experts in that field.
It's not often I sound this conservative about anything, but in hindsight it's not a bad way to do it. It's not perfect but I certainly can't think of a better way. It's also not so bad once you realise what academia is all about and what's going on, and there's still room for you to be you once all is said and done.
This article is just about how worried she is at the standard of critical and independant thinking. She's worried about google being a barrier to academic tradition in learning and, though it might be a bit over stated (though I think that's mostly because it's in a newspaper and not a lecture theatre to an audience of students and academics), she might have a point. We've got a new bunch of folk coming up whose skills in figuring things out are directed almost entirely to 'figuring out where to find it on the net'. That has its ups and downs. A kick into the realm of how authoritative knowledge is established and moved around can't really be a bad thing.

There's an interesting aside to all this; Professor Tara Brabazon was one of my (http://www.murdoch.edu.au/) lecturers years ago. Never had her as a tutor though, but I might have one of her books lying around still. She was notorious as one of the most flamboyant rock-star teachers of media studies in the country. She dressed as loud as she spoke and knew how to draw a crowd.
Media studies, at the time was generally a target for cutbacks as the Government squeezed tertiary education dry and talked up 'standards' and 'practicality'. Law and business were immune as they tended to make money and had lots of rote learning exams that are more easily quantifiable. But all of the humanities, history, social sciences, art and even science were for the chop and generally derided by the elite for being vague, wishy washy, wooly headed, left wing, no use to the economy etc. 'Standards' were to be enforced, easily quantifiable rote learning exams were to be instituted across the board. It was a terrible time (So long Johnny Howard! Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out) and the humanities were constantly on the defensive about their philosophies and methodologies. These often promoted open dialogues to undermine eliteism and conservatism, studying low brow things like bad movies, pulp fiction and pop culture, then writing it up with a strange and convaluted Foucalt derived post structuralist cadence. I'm not much of a fan of that stuff anymore, but it's not valueless and it's tough to defend against an assault from an arch conservative government who claims to speak for the average joe.
So for Tara Brabazon, one of Pop culture Studies' stalwarts, to hear about it for being arrogant and even elitist in an establishment/old-school-tie sort of way is pretty funny from my perspective. The practice she's instituting, of reading scads of supplied journal articles in first year, was, and I'm pretty sure still is, standard (*cough*) practice when I was at school (fetch granpa 'is teeth would ya?). And Murdoch still kinda is the notoriously lefty, free thinking, experimental education vanguard ( though not as much as it was). So from here it looks like she's just instituting the methods of the old alma mater in Brighton.

(dear god. it's huge)