Searching for original ideas
20/11/12 05:30
I have a stack of papers written by students of a class that I taught for Cotner College’s Education for Lay Ministry Program. I’ll have to finish with my reading and grading today or tomorrow so that I can get them returned. I struggle with reading the papers each time I teach the class. In the first place, I struggle with making the assignments in the first place. I have tried assigning traditional 10-page college papers, portfolios of smaller works, series of essays, and a variety of different projects and project reports to push the students to keep on learning when they are out of class and to provide some way of evaluating their progress.
The world is changing. The use of computers and the Internet by my students is universal. The papers I read contain all sorts of information that has been gleaned from the Internet, often without much discretion about what is factual and what is not. Worse, in my opinion, is that there is almost no care taken in discovering original sources. A student will cite as a reference a source that simply didn’t credit the source of its ideas. Plagiarism is redefined in the age of the Internet. Students use ideas without having a clue of their sources. It is sad to me that serious students lack the ability to discern the difference between an idea that has been part of our tradition for centuries and those that are genuinely new. Ancient disputes and controversies re-emerge in the writings of students without the students knowing that these arguments have played a role in the formation of the church for generations.
Part of the challenge for teachers is that of imparting critical thinking skills. Students can learn to distinguish between academic research and opinion. They can obtain skills for weighing the value of arguments and tools of logic for making judgments.
The larger challenge is dealing with the sheer volume of information that is available. In a pre-computer world, we used to go to libraries and review all of the relevant literature at the beginning of a research project. The literature review would tell us roughly what had already been written on our chosen topic and how the ideas had been treated by others. Our search was limited by the resources of the library. We didn’t have access to all of the documents that existed. We had the trusted sources that were employed by the library. By the time I got to graduate school, it was common for me to conduct research in multiple libraries, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of various collections. We chose our seminary in part on the group of different schools who had clustered in one location and formed agreements that allowed the easy transfer of information and sharing of learning between multiple schools.
These days I have access to the materials of universities around the world. I don’t have to travel to a specific address to check out the collections of major libraries. Virtually no journal research is done by obtaining actual paper copies of published journals. We read the articles on the screens of our computers after accessing them through the digital databases of university subscription services.
So it shouldn’t surprise me that students are confused about which sources to trust and which to ignore. It shouldn’t surprise me that students think that they have done their research and produce writing that is at the same time less than original and far from well researched.
The volume of information available makes it virtually impossible to know the origins of an idea. There are a few software applications that assist teachers in finding plagiarized ideas, but they are not very valuable for the papers that I read. My students believe that they are doing research when they find ideas that are new to them. They are usually not dishonest about crediting the sources of their materials. But the sources they cite are often far less ethical in crediting their sources than the students.
With the volume of information available, how does one discern whether one is being original, or merely repeating an idea that has been in circulation for a long time? Paul Rubens, in a piece written for BBC News, wrote about intellectual property and computer development. His article says that part of the reason that computer companies are constantly engaged in patent lawsuits is that it is less expensive to engage in patent lawsuits than to do the original patent research. With nearly 250,000 active patents relevant to mobile computing devices and an average of 20 claims of originality in each patent yields something like 5 million restrictions on intellectual property. There aren’t enough patent attorneys in the world to research every possible patent infringement in a new product. And if there were enough attorneys, there isn’t enough money, even in the super successful high tech firms, to pay for the research.
So they produce products, purchase as many patents as they can afford, and prepare to defend themselves in court. Sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. When they lose the cost seems high. Apple was recently ordered to pay $368 million to Connecticut-based VirnetX. Those settlements, however, are considered to be a part of routine business for the manufacturers of computers.
On a much smaller scale, my students engage in similar maneuvers. Overwhelmed by the huge volume of potential articles on any given topic, they read a few, make a few educated guesses on what the others might contain, then sit down and write without knowing that they have not exhausted the subject. The ease of internet publication has made everyone an instant expert.
Peer-reviewed articles still exist. There are sources that can be trusted. But teaching basic research methods to my students would take more time that I am allotted for the content area I am expected to teach.
So I will struggle with the papers as I complete my task. I will, as usual, grade on a bit of a curve, comparing the performance of the students to each other and setting aside my general disappointment in the entire stack of papers. I will enable the students to go on to the next courses and complete their programs believing that they will continue to learn and mature with time and experience.
And I keep reading carefully in hopes that one day I will discover a truly new idea in the midst of all of the clutter. The task gets more difficult each day. After all, I add 1,000 words of clutter each day with my morning blog.
The world is changing. The use of computers and the Internet by my students is universal. The papers I read contain all sorts of information that has been gleaned from the Internet, often without much discretion about what is factual and what is not. Worse, in my opinion, is that there is almost no care taken in discovering original sources. A student will cite as a reference a source that simply didn’t credit the source of its ideas. Plagiarism is redefined in the age of the Internet. Students use ideas without having a clue of their sources. It is sad to me that serious students lack the ability to discern the difference between an idea that has been part of our tradition for centuries and those that are genuinely new. Ancient disputes and controversies re-emerge in the writings of students without the students knowing that these arguments have played a role in the formation of the church for generations.
Part of the challenge for teachers is that of imparting critical thinking skills. Students can learn to distinguish between academic research and opinion. They can obtain skills for weighing the value of arguments and tools of logic for making judgments.
The larger challenge is dealing with the sheer volume of information that is available. In a pre-computer world, we used to go to libraries and review all of the relevant literature at the beginning of a research project. The literature review would tell us roughly what had already been written on our chosen topic and how the ideas had been treated by others. Our search was limited by the resources of the library. We didn’t have access to all of the documents that existed. We had the trusted sources that were employed by the library. By the time I got to graduate school, it was common for me to conduct research in multiple libraries, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of various collections. We chose our seminary in part on the group of different schools who had clustered in one location and formed agreements that allowed the easy transfer of information and sharing of learning between multiple schools.
These days I have access to the materials of universities around the world. I don’t have to travel to a specific address to check out the collections of major libraries. Virtually no journal research is done by obtaining actual paper copies of published journals. We read the articles on the screens of our computers after accessing them through the digital databases of university subscription services.
So it shouldn’t surprise me that students are confused about which sources to trust and which to ignore. It shouldn’t surprise me that students think that they have done their research and produce writing that is at the same time less than original and far from well researched.
The volume of information available makes it virtually impossible to know the origins of an idea. There are a few software applications that assist teachers in finding plagiarized ideas, but they are not very valuable for the papers that I read. My students believe that they are doing research when they find ideas that are new to them. They are usually not dishonest about crediting the sources of their materials. But the sources they cite are often far less ethical in crediting their sources than the students.
With the volume of information available, how does one discern whether one is being original, or merely repeating an idea that has been in circulation for a long time? Paul Rubens, in a piece written for BBC News, wrote about intellectual property and computer development. His article says that part of the reason that computer companies are constantly engaged in patent lawsuits is that it is less expensive to engage in patent lawsuits than to do the original patent research. With nearly 250,000 active patents relevant to mobile computing devices and an average of 20 claims of originality in each patent yields something like 5 million restrictions on intellectual property. There aren’t enough patent attorneys in the world to research every possible patent infringement in a new product. And if there were enough attorneys, there isn’t enough money, even in the super successful high tech firms, to pay for the research.
So they produce products, purchase as many patents as they can afford, and prepare to defend themselves in court. Sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. When they lose the cost seems high. Apple was recently ordered to pay $368 million to Connecticut-based VirnetX. Those settlements, however, are considered to be a part of routine business for the manufacturers of computers.
On a much smaller scale, my students engage in similar maneuvers. Overwhelmed by the huge volume of potential articles on any given topic, they read a few, make a few educated guesses on what the others might contain, then sit down and write without knowing that they have not exhausted the subject. The ease of internet publication has made everyone an instant expert.
Peer-reviewed articles still exist. There are sources that can be trusted. But teaching basic research methods to my students would take more time that I am allotted for the content area I am expected to teach.
So I will struggle with the papers as I complete my task. I will, as usual, grade on a bit of a curve, comparing the performance of the students to each other and setting aside my general disappointment in the entire stack of papers. I will enable the students to go on to the next courses and complete their programs believing that they will continue to learn and mature with time and experience.
And I keep reading carefully in hopes that one day I will discover a truly new idea in the midst of all of the clutter. The task gets more difficult each day. After all, I add 1,000 words of clutter each day with my morning blog.