The Life of the Mind

visualturn:

infoneer-pulse:

College and university librarians are concerned about students’ search skills, and no wonder:

At Illinois Wesleyan University, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process,” according to researchers there. They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited “a lack of understanding of search logic” that often foiled their attempts to find good sources.

The librarians quoted here understand most of the key problems, and are especially sharp about “the myth of the digital native” — about which see also this deeply sobering Metafilter thread — but there’s one vital issue they’re neglecting: research databases have the worst user interfaces in the whole world.

» via The Atlantic

Research database UI are truly abysmal, followed closely by the UI of most popular online course management systems, and by the UI for most college and university web sites for course registration and other student management activities.

Yet miraciously the forward facing web sites for most colleges and universities are glitzy and dazzling, precisely because they are seen primarily as a recruiting tool.

So there are two Internets in higher education: there’s the spectacularly slick 2012 Internet students see before they enroll, and there’s the barely usable and archaic throwback to a 1997 Internet that students must endure to interact with the registrar, the library, and their courses throughout the remainder of their college career.

— Visual Turn

An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks.

— William Deresiewicz

(Source: visualturn)