FYI@Librarian: Round table Discussion @ How (and whether) to use Open Access Materials in the Classroom

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Round table Discussion @ How (and whether) to use Open Access Materials in the Classroom

Round table Discussion @ How (and whether) to use Open Access Materials in the Classroom

The description of this roundtable discussion – how do we curate and evaluate open access materials in teaching situations?

Here are some thoughts.

Help students see what makes research good or not so good by looking at actual content, not by training them to recognize brands or to check the “peer-reviewed” box in library databases.
Don’t say “this would be a good journal for your paper.” Explain what a journal is – the ongoing record of conversations among a specific group of people asking a certain kind of question.
Don’t say “you must use peer-reviewed sources from scholarly journals.” Explain why, in a particular context, peer-reviewed research is preferred over other kinds of sources. But first, make sure it’s true. Sometimes an investigative journalist has done research that’s highly ethical and may be more helpful than the peer reviewed research available on the same subject.
Don’t say “use library resources, not stuff you find on the web.” You’re not preparing students for the world into which they will graduate.
Don’t pretend that research matters and then hide your own research in journals whose business model promotes injustice and public ignorance. Your students won’t have access to your research unless you take steps to make it accessible. Luckily, that is increasingly possible.
Don’t despair. Asking students to do research is a valuable learning experience. If we clear away the clutter of our tacit knowledge and think about why research matters for our students - and for the world - we can design authentic experiences that help them develop intellectual muscle that will serve them after they graduate. Work with them to frame questions that matter to them and help them query the things they encounter as they explore answers, and help them recognize quality research design and ethical argument. And be comforted that good research will be accessible to them – because so much more of it will be open in future.
Finally, think about how an open access journal like Cultural Anthropology could be used as a textbook for understanding the conversation of the field. The websites has not only the journal and its articles, which is great, but a variety of types of texts: Hot Spots and Dispatches and podcasts and so on. [At the conference, I also learned about Sapiens, which also presents anthropology research in a timely, accessible format.] Together they present a much richer conversation than what you find by searching for articles by topic using a library database. It seems to me to be proof that open access isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.