Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 75, Issue 22
I'm curious: what are the topics that are so new that the peer-reviewed literature is dated? Message: 4 Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:57:16 -0400 From: Tery G <teryg93@gmail.com> To: Air-L@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] acceptable sources for undergraduate research in new media fields Message-ID: <AANLkTinFiLJYCF8oL4jOCoRjSd-N9xASdF-Hz89=VC4z@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi all, I teach a freshman level class called Digital Media Literacy. It's an introduction to concepts and tools related to digital media. Each student does a final project, which, of course, requires them to do research. I spend a lot of time with them -- read articles, give examples, do some hands-on work, etc. -- covering why Google in particular and websites in general are not the sources they should be using (or trusting). They know how to use the library databases, but the topics they're examining are so new that anything in peer-reviewed journals about those topics is dated. Does anyone have suggestions about what might be acceptable resources in this situation? I let them use articles from *The New York Times* and the *Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication*, but I have difficulty justifying their not using some other sources I really would prefer they not use when they can't find new enough information in the peer-reviewed journals. TIA, Tery Griffin Associate Professor of Media Arts Wesley College Dover DE 19901
A surprising number. When we first heard the term "sexting," for instance, a student wanted to investigate that. There were newspaper articles about it, and a lot of discussion on the web, but it hadn't been around long enough for anything to have hit the peer-reviewed journals. Cyberbullying was another one of those topics. When students first heard about it and wanted to investigate it, there was either little or nothing in the peer-reviewed journals (I don't remember which now; it's been a while since that topic first came up). But there were discussions in reputable newspapers and current examples on the web. Another topic is a mixed bag: net neutrality. While there is information in peer-reviewed journals on net neutrality now, there was none at the time students first wanted to learn more about it. In that case, they can pull from the peer-reviewed journals now, but what we all really want to know is exactly where we are in the arguments about net neutrality right now. They can't find that in a peer-reviewed journal. Another question is what the best information is. Their final projects are multimedia presentations, and the best basic description of net neutrality I've seen is on Tim Berners-Lee's video blog. I do consider that a reputable source, though, which I tell them. So I guess that's the overall problem. Even for topics where they can find information in peer-reviewed journals, what they -- and I -- want to know is what's happening *now* in that particular area in this fast-moving new media environment. For that, they have to turn to sources that haven't had time to go through the peer-review process, even if they're headed that way, which they often are not. Tery On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 8:06 PM, Margaret Borschke < Margaret.Borschke@unsw.edu.au> wrote:
I'm curious: what are the topics that are so new that the peer-reviewed literature is dated?
Message: 4 Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:57:16 -0400 From: Tery G <teryg93@gmail.com> To: Air-L@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] acceptable sources for undergraduate research in new media fields Message-ID: <AANLkTinFiLJYCF8oL4jOCoRjSd-N9xASdF-Hz89=VC4z@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hi all,
I teach a freshman level class called Digital Media Literacy. It's an introduction to concepts and tools related to digital media. Each student does a final project, which, of course, requires them to do research. I spend a lot of time with them -- read articles, give examples, do some hands-on work, etc. -- covering why Google in particular and websites in general are not the sources they should be using (or trusting). They know how to use the library databases, but the topics they're examining are so new that anything in peer-reviewed journals about those topics is dated.
Does anyone have suggestions about what might be acceptable resources in this situation? I let them use articles from *The New York Times* and the *Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication*, but I have difficulty justifying their not using some other sources I really would prefer they not use when they can't find new enough information in the peer-reviewed journals.
TIA, Tery Griffin
Associate Professor of Media Arts Wesley College Dover DE 19901 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
In addition to concepts and trends such as cyberbullying, sexting, and so on, there's also the technologies themselves. Twitter was a breakthrough technology in many ways, but it took a while for peer-reviewed stuff to get published about it (and by now it has evolved so much that the first peer-reviewed articles seem dated). Same goes for Second Life (which, while I know it's still a vibrant place, pretty much seems to have come and gone in a hurry in terms of popular interest). And technologies that launched and were abandoned quickly (e.g., Google Wave) may never get peer-reviewed coverage. It's also instructive to use articles from the popular press when these tech trends happen. There's always the initial hype (and simultaneous warnings that the technology will ruin society) in the popular press, but eventually it evens out and scholarly work about the topic starts to have some meaning. I'm all for students looking at a variety of sources, so long as they're critically using them and have an appropriate amount of modesty in their claims. One of the best student papers I've ever read critically engaged the writing of Perez Hilton and other gossip blogs and how those sources were important for mainstream media. When's the last time you cited Perez in your work? db --- Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Journalism & Mass Communication University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carroll Hall, CB 3365 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (919) 962-0676 (office) (801) 633-4796 (cell) daren.brabham@unc.edu www.darenbrabham.com
even with such nascent topics as sexting, cyberbullying, Second Life, or Perez Hilton, I suspect there are relevant articles in at least some academic journal. for example, Google Scholar seems to indicate that their are articles on "bullying" at least back to the 1970s and 1980s. presumably, someone writing a paper about cyberbullying would want/need to cite sources about its non-cyber counterpart. I'm not saying that the citation of popular media is unnecessary or inappropriate, and I'm certainly not suggested that articles about the exact topic of interest will necessarily be published. however, I'm skeptical of the assertion that *no* relevant papers exist simply because the topic is so novel. "There is nothing new under the sun," and emergent online behaviors are almost certainly related to previously existing offline behaviors. ~Eric -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re:[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 75, Issue 22 From: Brabham, Daren C <dbrabham@email.unc.edu> To: Tery G <teryg93@gmail.com>, Margaret Borschke <Margaret.Borschke@unsw.edu.au> Date: Thu Oct 21 09:22:58 2010
In addition to concepts and trends such as cyberbullying, sexting, and so on, there's also the technologies themselves. Twitter was a breakthrough technology in many ways, but it took a while for peer-reviewed stuff to get published about it (and by now it has evolved so much that the first peer-reviewed articles seem dated). Same goes for Second Life (which, while I know it's still a vibrant place, pretty much seems to have come and gone in a hurry in terms of popular interest). And technologies that launched and were abandoned quickly (e.g., Google Wave) may never get peer-reviewed coverage.
It's also instructive to use articles from the popular press when these tech trends happen. There's always the initial hype (and simultaneous warnings that the technology will ruin society) in the popular press, but eventually it evens out and scholarly work about the topic starts to have some meaning. I'm all for students looking at a variety of sources, so long as they're critically using them and have an appropriate amount of modesty in their claims.
One of the best student papers I've ever read critically engaged the writing of Perez Hilton and other gossip blogs and how those sources were important for mainstream media. When's the last time you cited Perez in your work?
db
--- Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Journalism & Mass Communication University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carroll Hall, CB 3365 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (919) 962-0676 (office) (801) 633-4796 (cell) daren.brabham@unc.edu www.darenbrabham.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Ah, I see. Yes, they can certainly find something that's somehow related to almost anything. What they can't find is the exact topic itself, or what's happening currently with that topic. And honestly, I don't want them creating presentations on "the history of ________" because that hasn't worked in the past. The students who have done it have not engaged with the material and have created presentations that were uninspired, to say the least. I've discovered that the students who head in that direction are looking for the easy way out, but I want to see them *thinking* about their topic, asking questions of it and trying to find answers to those questions. Tery On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Eric P. S. Baumer <epb47@cornell.edu>wrote:
even with such nascent topics as sexting, cyberbullying, Second Life, or Perez Hilton, I suspect there are relevant articles in at least some academic journal. for example, Google Scholar seems to indicate that their are articles on "bullying" at least back to the 1970s and 1980s. presumably, someone writing a paper about cyberbullying would want/need to cite sources about its non-cyber counterpart.
I'm not saying that the citation of popular media is unnecessary or inappropriate, and I'm certainly not suggested that articles about the exact topic of interest will necessarily be published. however, I'm skeptical of the assertion that *no* relevant papers exist simply because the topic is so novel. "There is nothing new under the sun," and emergent online behaviors are almost certainly related to previously existing offline behaviors.
~Eric
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re:[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 75, Issue 22 From: Brabham, Daren C <dbrabham@email.unc.edu> To: Tery G <teryg93@gmail.com>, Margaret Borschke < Margaret.Borschke@unsw.edu.au> Date: Thu Oct 21 09:22:58 2010
In addition to concepts and trends such as cyberbullying, sexting, and so on, there's also the technologies themselves. Twitter was a breakthrough technology in many ways, but it took a while for peer-reviewed stuff to get published about it (and by now it has evolved so much that the first peer-reviewed articles seem dated). Same goes for Second Life (which, while I know it's still a vibrant place, pretty much seems to have come and gone in a hurry in terms of popular interest). And technologies that launched and were abandoned quickly (e.g., Google Wave) may never get peer-reviewed coverage.
It's also instructive to use articles from the popular press when these tech trends happen. There's always the initial hype (and simultaneous warnings that the technology will ruin society) in the popular press, but eventually it evens out and scholarly work about the topic starts to have some meaning. I'm all for students looking at a variety of sources, so long as they're critically using them and have an appropriate amount of modesty in their claims.
One of the best student papers I've ever read critically engaged the writing of Perez Hilton and other gossip blogs and how those sources were important for mainstream media. When's the last time you cited Perez in your work?
db
--- Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Journalism & Mass Communication University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carroll Hall, CB 3365 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (919) 962-0676 (office) (801) 633-4796 (cell) daren.brabham@unc.edu www.darenbrabham.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
participants (4)
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Brabham, Daren C -
Eric P. S. Baumer -
Margaret Borschke -
Tery G