I’ve been thinking about the Peer Review talk again over the last month, which I know you have not seen, but part of my struggle with these concepts is precisely with the idea that audience is maybe not the right way to approach this concept because it is so grasp-able. But what I worry about is that the student will take from that “scholarship is important when I am writing for scholars, but once I am out of school I will not write for scholars anymore so I can just ignore it.”

Your last point is so, so, important – they won’t have access to the ticky boxes that “limit to scholarly sources” and the tools anymore. But they will have access to scholarship – I can’t contemplate working hard for Open Access on the one hand and accepting that scholarship only has value in school on the other. We got the question the last time we did the peer review talk – how should we deal with the fact that most of them will be locked out of the ticky box tools and licensed content when they leave. And my knee jerk answer was that there is so much quality, research-based work available out there that my main concern is not that students will leave and will not be able to find it – my main concern is that they will leave and they will not be motivated to do so.

The Lloyd article last week gets at this a bit – talking about how it is important to us to do that text-based, what it’s like in our knowledge community (whether we’re talking procedural manuals for firefighters or the scholarly literature in sociology) reading and learning at one phase, but that to be really information literate you also have to learn how to learn beyond that – to learn how to get the info you need to function when the ideal, controlled-conditions environment isn’t your working environment, which it never is.

Man, I think this might have blown up into another post :-) And I didn’t even get into all of the thoughts I have about the tacit information literacy skills that good students have.

Cheers – amd

In some ways, what they’re talking about isn’t all that rarified – even students who wouldn’t get the idea of discourse communities defined by different standards of what counts as information or evidence or a legitimate research question do understand the rhetorical concept of audience. They know that how they express themselves on facebook is not the way they would express themselves when writing a paper for an English course. That the explanation they would give to friends about why they were running late to a concert is different in terms of evidence and argument than the one they’d give the cop who pulled them over.

Lately I’ve been thinking we actually spend too much time introducing students to the specifics of disciplinary discourse. I’ve been pleased when upper division students understand those differences but resist them by finding common ground between something they read in a philosophy course and a pop culture phenomenon or a psychology experiment they read about in the paper. Writing well in a generic sense to me is a greater (at least more useful) accomplishment than writing that competently mimics the style of a particular academic discipline. And I suspect learning to apply inquiry skills to cross-disciplinary (and non-academic) pursuits is undermined when we focus too much on a process that is too much focused on the steps you go through to complete a school assignment.

For example, in “real life” I almost never start research by “determining the extent of information needed.” I start by encountering something that makes me curious or angry or excited. “Determining the extent of information needed” sounds suspiciously like “ten pages and at least six sources.”

In some ways, I think we teach our students community standards but forget to mention they are merely the standards of a particular community. But they know that, and shelve what hey learn in the library as “how to get through college assignments” without ever planning to take it out and use it in other contexts.

It doesn’t help that so much of what they spend time learning is bound to a particular library, that the tools they spend time learning are not available once they leave school and have no research library providing subscriptions. Unplanned obsolescence?