Relevant History - Researching in the Internet Age

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Relevant History - Researching in the Internet Age



Let's be honest. The internet has been a boon to scholarship. From muse through to published work, the interconnectedness of this particular web has eased the process for academics. There is no denying that. Students, however, have taken a different lesson from the internet. Each semester I assign my students a research project that requires three secondary sources and one primary source. Each semester, the best papers meet the expectations, and the worst cite Wikipedia. How can we better help students use the proper edge of this two-edged sword?

The first step to historical research is muse. Since students don't know much about a topic at the beginning of the semester, I encourage them to find the relevant history context on the internet. Wikipedia is a time saver here. They can leap down the rabbit hole exploring different topics. Next, a search in Google may turn up useful context as well. Remember that students entering your course may not have the "common sense" background in a subject that you do. When that information is read, the tricky part comes for students. They'll ask themselves, "Didn't I just learn a great deal of useful information from these sites?" Sure, you'll tell them if they ask, but it is not about "textbook" information. Instructors must demand that students go farther down the research path. Once the basic context is known, students can get into the historiographical debate. The debate is where students start to see relevant history.

The library is the next stage. Students hate this part today. To them, it is easier to Google a topic and cite the first three websites. I don't denigrate the work on those sites, but about.com is rarely written for the scholar, and scholarship is what they should be after. Scholarly sources have time, care, and dare I say love put into them. The library investigates these sources and spends an ever shrinking budget on them every year. So, if they're in the library, students can trust that some of the hard work of evaluation has been done for them. Moreover, the library contains librarians. These talented folks went to school specifically to navigate the world of scholarship. Encourage students to utilize these specialists, no matter their speciality.

Once students have visited the library and examined journals and monographs, the synthesis can begin. Synthesis is what makes relevant history work. We have to convince students that even though they probably won't discover anything groundbreaking, that they can go beyond a mere report. They can make judgements based upon legitimate scholarship. They're doing it in their everyday lives when they engage news sources, so why not work with that every day skill in the classroom?

There is an expression that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Well, you can lead a student to the library, but you can't make them read. It is worth the effort to take your students to the library on campus and familiarize them with going through the stacks. A generation of students used to consuming information from a screen may just appreciate that all the books on George Washington are right there next to one another. What convenience! They may not have as much fun, but you'll get better papers, they'll get a better education, and all involved will enjoy relevant history.

Stephen Griffin is an adjunct historian at Palomar College outside of San Diego, CA. Relevant History is now at the heart of the Adjunct to History series of readers. Making history relevant and loved by students is Griffin's life's work.

[http://cuttingedgehistory.com]

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Stephen_E_Griffin/732252


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5026438






_(By Stephen E Griffin).

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