Well, we all know that for students (and anyone else) the problem is no longer a paucity of specialist information but an excess. Once upon a time it might have required a trip to the card catalogue, then searching some books that specialised in documenting sources, or more recently some CDROM databases that indexed journals. The next step would be to search the library for copies, photocopying them, and reading them. In many cases you would need to complete quite detailed paperwork to request the material from another institution.
Now, if you are doing substantial research, you might still do all of this, but only if that is your primary job. For everyone else (students, busy professionals), we have different strategies, and much more friction free access to research materials (regardless of the quality of the outcomes of such research strategies). Visit the library online, search the journal databases online, tick the boxes, receive the pdfs.
{Now if only there was decent concordance software for the desktop you wouldn’t even need to read them, search for the key term, find them all in context, skim it and you’re done.}
So, for contemporary students there are two three skills required:
- How to find information properly (you know, step beyond Google, as well as actually using Google properly)
- How to farm this information successfully
- How to understand this information (how it becomes knowledge)
The first is easy to teach, though harder to get students to own. The second becomes a key part of network literacies, since we now have an enormous variety of tools to find things (RSS subscriptions from relevant blogs, tags in CiteULike, announcements of contents of new journal issues, and so on) and then various strategies for harvesting this (social bookmarking, blogging, tagging, Yojimbo like systems). The third is much more old fashioned. You can only successfully farm information into knowledge if you have a grounding. You get this grounding from reading, the sort of reading you do because you enjoy learning, reading a lot and letting stuff (all bits and often wrong) get stuck in your head.
This is the difference between naive research (which confuses information as knowledge and has no way of shifting the mass into value) and an informed research. The same conversation could be had about art and design practices.
Tags: practice, tools
