This blog tends to focus on research and often comments on how technological developments will alter the management of information and the computation of data. Occasionally, however, we also discuss issues within the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees (and modules) our team happens to deliver. It is therefore worthwhile announcing to all those who read the blog that our team has launched a new undergraduate degree programme for 2011: BSc Business Communications.
In BSc Business Communications at LJMU (UCAS Code: N102) students will study the strategic importance of communication, information and technology, and the role these play in the modern business organisation. Further information on the new programme can be found at our standalone BSc Business Communications website, the official LJMU BSc Business Communications website, or our Facebook group (BSc Business Communications at LJMU). BSc Business Communications is recruiting now for 2011/2012.
Showing posts with label undergraduate students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label undergraduate students. Show all posts
Monday, 15 November 2010
Monday, 29 March 2010
Students' information literacy: three events collide with cosmic significance...
Three random – but related – events collided last week, as if part of some cosmic information literacy solar system...
Firstly, I completed marking student submissions for Business Information Management (LBSIS1036). This is a level one module which introduces web technologies to students; but it is also a module which introduces information literacy skills. These skills are tested in an in-lab assessment in which students can demonstrate their ability to critically evaluate information, ascertain provenance, IPR, etc. To assist them the students are introduced to evaluation methodologies in the sessions preceding the assessment which they can use to test the provenance of information sources found on the 'surface web'.
Students' performance in the assessment was patchy. Those students that invested a small amount of time studying found themselves with marks within the 2:1 to First range; but sadly most didn't invest the preparation time and found themselves in the doldrums, or failing altogether. What was most revealing about their performance was the fact that – despite several taught sessions outlining appropriate information evaluation methodologies – a large proportion of students informed me in their manuscripts that their decision to select a resource was not because i
t fulfilled particular aspects of their evaluation criteria, but because the resource featured in the top five results within Google and therefore must be reliable. Indeed, the evaluation criteria were dismissed by many students in favour of the perceived reliability of Google's PageRank to provide a resource which is accurate, authoritative, objective, current, and with appropriate coverage. Said one student in response to 'Please describe the evaluation criteria used to assess the provenance of the resource selected': "The reason I selected this resource is that it features within the top five results on Google and therefore is a trustworthy source of information".
Aside from the fact these students completely missed the point of the assessment and clearly didn't learn anything from Chris Taylor or me, it strikes fear in the heart of a man that these students will continue their academic studies (and perhaps their post-university life) without the most basic information literacy skills. It's a depressing thought if one dwells on it for long enough. On the positive side, only one student used Wikipedia...which leads me to the next cosmic event...
Last week I was doing my periodic 'catch up' on some recent research literature. This normally entails scanning my RSS feeds for recently published papers in the journals and flicking through the pages of the recent issues of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). A paper published in JASIST at the tail end of 2009 caught my eye: 'How and Why Do College Students Use Wikipedia?' by Sook Lim which, compared to the hyper scientific paper titles such as 'A relation between h-index and impact factor in the power-law model' or 'Exploiting corpus-related ontologies for conceptualizing document corpora' (another interesting paper), sounds quite magazine-like. Lim investigated and analysed data on students' perceptions, uses of, and motivations for using Wikipedia in order to better understand student information seeking behaviour. She employed frameworks from social cognitive theory and 'uses and gratification' literature. Her findings are too detailed to summarise here. Suffice to say, Lim found many students to use Wikipedia for academic purposes, but not in their academic work; rather, students used Wikipedia to check facts and figures quickly, or to glean quick background information so that they could better direct their studying. In fact, although students found Wikipedia to be useful for fact checking, etc., their perceptions of its information quality were not high at all. Students knew it to be a suspect source and were sceptical when using it.
After the A&E experience of marking the LBSIS1036 submissions, Lim's results were fantastic news and my spirits were lifted immediately. Students are more discerning than we give them credit for, I thought to myself. Fantastic! 'Information Armageddon' doesn't await Generation Y after all. Imagine my disappointment the following morning when I boarded a train to Liverpool Central to find myself seated next to four students. It was here that I would experience my third cosmic event. Gazing out the train window as the sun was rising over Bootle docks and the majesty of its containerisation, I couldn't help but listen to the students as they were discussing an assignment which they had all completed and were on their journey to submit. The discussion followed the usual format, e.g. "What did you write in your essay?" "How did you structure yours?", etc. It then emerged that all four of them had used Wikipedia as the principal source for their essay and that they simply copied and pasted passages verbatim. In fact, one student remarked, "The lecturer might get suspicious if you copy it directly, so all I do is change the order of any bullet points and paragraphs. I change some of the words used too". (!!!!!!!!!!)
My hope would be that these students get caught cheating because, even without using Turnitin, catching students cheating with sources such as Wikipedia is easy peasy. But a bigger question is whether information literacy instruction is a futile pursuit? Will instant gratification always prevail?
Image: Polaroidmemories (Flickr), CreativeCommons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
Firstly, I completed marking student submissions for Business Information Management (LBSIS1036). This is a level one module which introduces web technologies to students; but it is also a module which introduces information literacy skills. These skills are tested in an in-lab assessment in which students can demonstrate their ability to critically evaluate information, ascertain provenance, IPR, etc. To assist them the students are introduced to evaluation methodologies in the sessions preceding the assessment which they can use to test the provenance of information sources found on the 'surface web'.
Students' performance in the assessment was patchy. Those students that invested a small amount of time studying found themselves with marks within the 2:1 to First range; but sadly most didn't invest the preparation time and found themselves in the doldrums, or failing altogether. What was most revealing about their performance was the fact that – despite several taught sessions outlining appropriate information evaluation methodologies – a large proportion of students informed me in their manuscripts that their decision to select a resource was not because i
t fulfilled particular aspects of their evaluation criteria, but because the resource featured in the top five results within Google and therefore must be reliable. Indeed, the evaluation criteria were dismissed by many students in favour of the perceived reliability of Google's PageRank to provide a resource which is accurate, authoritative, objective, current, and with appropriate coverage. Said one student in response to 'Please describe the evaluation criteria used to assess the provenance of the resource selected': "The reason I selected this resource is that it features within the top five results on Google and therefore is a trustworthy source of information".Aside from the fact these students completely missed the point of the assessment and clearly didn't learn anything from Chris Taylor or me, it strikes fear in the heart of a man that these students will continue their academic studies (and perhaps their post-university life) without the most basic information literacy skills. It's a depressing thought if one dwells on it for long enough. On the positive side, only one student used Wikipedia...which leads me to the next cosmic event...
Last week I was doing my periodic 'catch up' on some recent research literature. This normally entails scanning my RSS feeds for recently published papers in the journals and flicking through the pages of the recent issues of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). A paper published in JASIST at the tail end of 2009 caught my eye: 'How and Why Do College Students Use Wikipedia?' by Sook Lim which, compared to the hyper scientific paper titles such as 'A relation between h-index and impact factor in the power-law model' or 'Exploiting corpus-related ontologies for conceptualizing document corpora' (another interesting paper), sounds quite magazine-like. Lim investigated and analysed data on students' perceptions, uses of, and motivations for using Wikipedia in order to better understand student information seeking behaviour. She employed frameworks from social cognitive theory and 'uses and gratification' literature. Her findings are too detailed to summarise here. Suffice to say, Lim found many students to use Wikipedia for academic purposes, but not in their academic work; rather, students used Wikipedia to check facts and figures quickly, or to glean quick background information so that they could better direct their studying. In fact, although students found Wikipedia to be useful for fact checking, etc., their perceptions of its information quality were not high at all. Students knew it to be a suspect source and were sceptical when using it.
After the A&E experience of marking the LBSIS1036 submissions, Lim's results were fantastic news and my spirits were lifted immediately. Students are more discerning than we give them credit for, I thought to myself. Fantastic! 'Information Armageddon' doesn't await Generation Y after all. Imagine my disappointment the following morning when I boarded a train to Liverpool Central to find myself seated next to four students. It was here that I would experience my third cosmic event. Gazing out the train window as the sun was rising over Bootle docks and the majesty of its containerisation, I couldn't help but listen to the students as they were discussing an assignment which they had all completed and were on their journey to submit. The discussion followed the usual format, e.g. "What did you write in your essay?" "How did you structure yours?", etc. It then emerged that all four of them had used Wikipedia as the principal source for their essay and that they simply copied and pasted passages verbatim. In fact, one student remarked, "The lecturer might get suspicious if you copy it directly, so all I do is change the order of any bullet points and paragraphs. I change some of the words used too". (!!!!!!!!!!)
My hope would be that these students get caught cheating because, even without using Turnitin, catching students cheating with sources such as Wikipedia is easy peasy. But a bigger question is whether information literacy instruction is a futile pursuit? Will instant gratification always prevail?
Image: Polaroidmemories (Flickr), CreativeCommons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
Thursday, 17 January 2008
The 'Google Generation' mentality spreads beyond 'the kids'...
The undergraduate students coming through LJMU (particularly those in level one and our future undergraduates) are fully paid-up members of the so-called 'digital generation'. Strange as it is for those born before 1989, the digital generation have never known life without the Internet or the web. Bizarre, isn't it?! Perhaps more derogatively, these digital kids have been labelled – perhaps justifiably – as the 'Google Generation'; kids that rely on a single search engine to satisfy their information needs, a search engine that is incapable of tapping a 'deep web' six times the size of the surface web. These are the kids that are incapable of engaging in critical research proficiently, apparently.
Such users have been known to the library, computer and information science fields for some time as the 'satisfied inept' – another pejorative label for the kids. All this negative labelling of 'the kids' does get depressing though. The Google Generation may therefore be pleased to learn that recently published research indicates the Google Generation is now being replaced by a wider 'Google Society'.
Funded by the JISC and the British Library, the respected CIBER research team at University College London note that despite student familiarity with IT, most rely on the most basic search tools and lack some of the most basic analytical skills required to evaluate and retrieve information on the web. No surprise there. However, the research report ('Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future') also found that research-behaviour traits commonly associated with the digital generation (e.g. intolerance of remotely sluggish information retrieval systems, impatience with navigational systems, reluctance to use alternative - but more effective - search tools, etc.) are now typical among all age groups. The report makes all sorts of recommendations, including urgent government action with respect to information literacy and for digital libraries to up their game (which I think many are doing…).
This is all interesting stuff and echoes some of what Bill Thompson noted recently on Leading Edge, and which was commented upon on this blog. But returning the focus back to the digital generation (or Google Generation), my experience of undergraduate students is that many of them – even the 'techies' – not only lack information literacy skills, but actually lack familiarity with IT, even with humdrum applications like MS Office. This phenomenon is highlighted in the CIBER report, with student familiarity of Internet Explorer and MS Word at 100%, but knowledge of spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, etc. very low – and these are just basic everyday applications. Am I isolated in my experience with students? Should the urgent government action with respect to information literacy also include more emphasis on the ICT literacy we thought already existed?
Shifting back again to the 'satisfied inept' theme (did we ever leave?!), the most interesting research paper I read that encountered this phenomenon was by Barnum et al. (2004) when exploring the effectiveness of back-of-book indexes in information retrieval within e-books. They evaluated a version of Adobe Acrobat Reader e-Book utilising an index with the locators hyperlinked to the page reference for each entry. They then compared this to an alternative version of the same e-book. The difference with the latter version was that it didn't include an index but relied on the full-text search capabilities provided by Acrobat Reader. Barnum et al. derived extremely interesting results. Users found more relevant information, more quickly and efficiently, using the index than they did using free-text searching; however, when asked which they prefer, the users said 'free-text' searching. When told they performed better with the index (mainly due to difficulties with query formulation), they still said that they would continue to use free-text searching. How frustrating is that?
Like CIBER say, urgent information literacy skills is clearly necessary for the Google Society; however, for the Google Generation currently working their way through university now, the carrots need to be made a lot more attractive. We have to coax students out of their habitual and almost ritualistic use of the major search engines, just enough so that they can appreciate what they've been missing since they were born. To that end, perhaps the use of a big stick might be better?!
Such users have been known to the library, computer and information science fields for some time as the 'satisfied inept' – another pejorative label for the kids. All this negative labelling of 'the kids' does get depressing though. The Google Generation may therefore be pleased to learn that recently published research indicates the Google Generation is now being replaced by a wider 'Google Society'.
Funded by the JISC and the British Library, the respected CIBER research team at University College London note that despite student familiarity with IT, most rely on the most basic search tools and lack some of the most basic analytical skills required to evaluate and retrieve information on the web. No surprise there. However, the research report ('Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future') also found that research-behaviour traits commonly associated with the digital generation (e.g. intolerance of remotely sluggish information retrieval systems, impatience with navigational systems, reluctance to use alternative - but more effective - search tools, etc.) are now typical among all age groups. The report makes all sorts of recommendations, including urgent government action with respect to information literacy and for digital libraries to up their game (which I think many are doing…).
This is all interesting stuff and echoes some of what Bill Thompson noted recently on Leading Edge, and which was commented upon on this blog. But returning the focus back to the digital generation (or Google Generation), my experience of undergraduate students is that many of them – even the 'techies' – not only lack information literacy skills, but actually lack familiarity with IT, even with humdrum applications like MS Office. This phenomenon is highlighted in the CIBER report, with student familiarity of Internet Explorer and MS Word at 100%, but knowledge of spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, etc. very low – and these are just basic everyday applications. Am I isolated in my experience with students? Should the urgent government action with respect to information literacy also include more emphasis on the ICT literacy we thought already existed?
Shifting back again to the 'satisfied inept' theme (did we ever leave?!), the most interesting research paper I read that encountered this phenomenon was by Barnum et al. (2004) when exploring the effectiveness of back-of-book indexes in information retrieval within e-books. They evaluated a version of Adobe Acrobat Reader e-Book utilising an index with the locators hyperlinked to the page reference for each entry. They then compared this to an alternative version of the same e-book. The difference with the latter version was that it didn't include an index but relied on the full-text search capabilities provided by Acrobat Reader. Barnum et al. derived extremely interesting results. Users found more relevant information, more quickly and efficiently, using the index than they did using free-text searching; however, when asked which they prefer, the users said 'free-text' searching. When told they performed better with the index (mainly due to difficulties with query formulation), they still said that they would continue to use free-text searching. How frustrating is that?
Like CIBER say, urgent information literacy skills is clearly necessary for the Google Society; however, for the Google Generation currently working their way through university now, the carrots need to be made a lot more attractive. We have to coax students out of their habitual and almost ritualistic use of the major search engines, just enough so that they can appreciate what they've been missing since they were born. To that end, perhaps the use of a big stick might be better?!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)