My younger son, Nick, is in first grade, which means that homework is still an interesting novelty for him.

His class was studying owls for a while, which captured his imagination. He checked out some books from the school library on owls and we read them together. He told his teacher some of the things that he’d learned, so she suggested that he write down a few facts from the book so he could share them with the class.

That evening, he sat at the dinner table happily reading and writing (and taking frequent breaks). Later, unasked, he shared his research method with me: “I read a little and then I decide what I thought was interesting. Then I go back and write that down.”

I told him, “that’s exactly what I have been telling college students to do these last few weeks. You have an excellent head start on college.”

I had another shock of recognition later when I was looking at the work Nick had brought home. Apparently the class had moved on from owls to bats:

This is exactly what I have been telling my students to do this fall. Take your subject and put it in the center. Then come up with a few things you know about the subject–if you don’t know much, go to Wikipedia or some other source likely to give you an overview. Then write down around the central subject some details that you find interesting, using single words or short phrases. From there, you can come up with something that looks more like a research question. Why do bats have white noses when they get sick? If they eat 1,000 bugs an hour, what happens if they run out? How do scientists know they have a real good sense of smell, and when they get sick (with their white noses) does that mean they can’t smell so well? How does that affect them? And so on.

I’m not sure if I’m thrilled that my son is learning these strategies so young or if I’m a bit saddened to realize that people need to be taught the same thing over and over again before it really sticks.

Thanks Barbara Fister for Occupy Knowledge and John Dupuis for The power of blogs, or #OccupyScholComm who helped inspire this post.

Let’s talk money.

The current inflation rate is 3.87%.

Academic library budgets are flat, or worse.

But at my college library, SAGE is charging us about a 9% increase over what we paid last year. I believe we are locked in to 5% increases for the next two years.

The American Chemical Society is charging a 7.4% increase.

SAGE is a commercial publisher, aiming to maximize its bottom line, though I think it is in danger of killing the golden goose.

The ACS is a nonprofit organization, chartered by Congress. The ACS also accredits college chemistry departments, and one of the conditions of accreditation is subscribing to top chemistry journals, many of which (surprise!) are published by the ACS. So that’s either a conflict of interest or a protection racket, depending on how generous you are feeling. “That’s a nice little chemistry department you have there, library. It’s be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

SAGE and the ACS both publish high-quality academic journals, some of which are vital to our faculty and students’ work. And it’s true, like so many other libraries, we have accepted these terms, so one could argue that we have only ourselves to blame.

If we have only ourselves to blame, then it stands to reason that only we can fix this.

Like the protestors of Occupy Wall Street, I don’t have clear demands. I don’t have a clear solution. But, like those protestors I can also tell when the many are getting screwed to benefit the few.

#OccupyScholComm

Catherine Pellegrino wrote about talking to students about “good sources” today, and that’s something that has come up a lot for me this fall in classes with first-year students.

Catherine’s answer to the question, “is this a good source?” starts with “it depends on what you are using it for,” and that’s where I often start, too. The question isn’t “is this good?” The question is “is it good for you?”

I think about one of my academic heroes, Gerald Graff, and the course I took from him as an undergraduate. He said it made little sense to talk about “good books” unless you also talk about “good for what?” or “good for whom?” This was during the “canon wars” of the late 1980s, and Graff used the example of Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. Ideologically, Graff said, he thought it was a lousy book. But for teaching a class about academic controversies, it was a great book.

I sometimes ask students if they will be using the source as a primary or secondary source. Will they use it, as Catherine says, as an example of media coverage or example of how people are responding to a situation? Then it’s more or less a primary source, and there’s no reason not to use it. If they intend to use it as a secondary source, as an article where they plan to engage with the author’s argument and evidence, then they might hold it to a higher academic standard.

We often show students how to use a scholarly article’s bibliography to find more sources, but that’s possible with popular press articles, too. (This is another strategy I know I have seen Catherine write about but neither she nor I can come up with a link at the moment.) As an example, I was talking to a first-year class in religion, and a student in the class asked about an article very similar to this one in The Jewish Daily Forward: Study Says Religious Victims Coped Better With 9/11 Attacks. Is that a good source?

I told her that news articles like this are a gift. Students normally wouldn’t use the news article itself, but it gives many important details about the study they are writing about: the authors & author affiliations, the name of the journal where it will appear, and even the fact that it has been online at the journal site since earlier this year. I told my student to think of this article like a book review. You usually won’t have cause to cite a book review, but you might want to silently thank it for leading you to a good (for you) book, and preparing you ahead of time with a lens with which to read it.