Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Today on episode number 634 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Outdated Research Notions with Jane Hammons and Adrienne Warner.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:13]:
Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:21]:
Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed, Episode 634. Most of us picked up a set of rules about research somewhere along the way. Don't use Wikipedia.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:02]:
Google Scholar is never the way to start. Find a peer-reviewed article, and you're on solid ground. Some of that advice has stopped working as effectively as it might once have, and a little of it may never have worked the way we had hoped. My guests today have spent the last few years naming these outdated notions and offering more beneficial approaches in their place. Jane Hammons is the Head of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University Libraries, where her research focuses on the meeting point of information literacy and faculty development. Adrienne Warner is an Undergraduate Engagement Librarian and Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico, whose work centers on how students find their footing and their sense of belonging as researchers. Together, they have led Outdated Research Notions workshops across the country and beyond, and I am so glad to have them both here.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:07]:
Thanks also to Mandi Goodsett from Cleveland State University. She heard me make a mention when I had Rebecca Fordon, another librarian, on. I said something about not having had enough librarians on recent years. And Mandi, as you're about to hear, your recommendation was perfect. Thank you again for reaching out and for introducing me to Jane and Adrienne. Jane and Adrienne, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.
Adrienne Warner [00:02:40]:
Thank you so much for having us.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:43]:
All right, that was Adrienne that started off, and Jane, for the purposes of our podcast editor and production support person, who will be trying to put voices together. What a joy it is to talk with each of you today. We're going to start out with the theme of outdated notions. Adrienne, why don't we start with you? Tell us a little bit about how you got interested and curious about what outdated notions all of us may be carrying around about our work.
Adrienne Warner [00:03:16]:
Absolutely. So let's go back in time to 2021. And my colleagues here at the University of New Mexico and I were prepping for an instructor development workshop series, and we came across this white paper from Stanford School of Education. And this white paper was written by Wineburg, Breakstone, and Ziv, and they listed some— what they didn't say outdated notions, they said some traps that students can fall into and kind of get hoodwinked.
Adrienne Warner [00:03:52]:
And they listed some of them out, and I recognized some of those in my work with students, and I thought, what if we just made a list of what we're seeing students come to us with in terms of bottlenecks or misunderstandings about how to evaluate credibility and information that they're finding online? And so, because we work with a bunch of different students, especially early undergraduates, we've gotten a lot of this anecdata about what students are getting hung up on, and we thought, okay, if we made our list, how would it compare with Breakstone and his colleagues? And then we decided, what if we talked about this in our information literacy workshops here on campus? And then maybe we should talk about it in a broader setting, taking it to conferences and whatnot, to see—
Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:45]:
Right.
Adrienne Warner [00:04:46]:
if it would gain any traction outside of our local context, and it did. And that's when we met Jane in 2023. And since then, we've really been talking a lot about various outdated notions, some controversial notions, and also evolving our own understanding about how these notions may be affecting students. And I will say that I, I have taught some of these, right? Like, I have taught outdated notions, not believing that they were outdated or not seeing that there was anything wrong with them. And I think that's entirely human, right? Like, we all want to do the best by our students. We want to give the best advice, the best pro tips for how to approach that crazy information landscape online, who to trust, what not to trust. And so we're all coming at this with a very human and very, like, positive approach. And so, it's taken a lot of reflection and thought about, like, what, what am I doing in my practice and what could I improve on? And I think it's a little bit similar to how fields evolve, right? We don't teach learning styles anymore.
Adrienne Warner [00:06:02]:
We don't teach visual, kinesthetic, and all that stuff because we know that Universal Design is actually a better approach now. And it's not that everyone was wrong when they were doing the best they could with the information they had at the time in learning styles, but just that when we got new information, we could have the opportunity to change our practices in the classroom.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:25]:
Oh, I want to pick up on a word, and Jane, I'm going to kick it over to you in a minute. I want to pick up on a word that Adrienne used from that article that kind of kicked much of this off. It's the word hoodwinked. And it's very similar to the word that Mike Caulfield introduced to me, or this whole concept of— because we're teaching in such polarized times, and I just found it so helpful to shift the way that I present some of these skills and strategies around information literacy, rather than this is right and this is wrong, to do it out of kindness that none of us wants to get hoodwinked. I love that word. None of us wants to get tricked or that kind of a thing, to almost shift the conversation where it's not a right-wrong conversation and much more out of care for the person. And then I also heard Adrian talking about the humility that can be so wonderful to infuse. What's coming up for you, Jane, in terms of how we might position ourselves when working with students to adapt to the polarizing times that we find ourselves in?
Jane Hammons [00:07:41]:
So I would say, for me, so much of my work is these days not actually working directly with students, but working with course instructors and working with faculty members in sort of more of a faculty developer role. So in that context, you know, I try to encourage the faculty members to recognize that they have developed over the years a great deal of expertise and knowledge about how to engage with information in their fields, how to engage with information in their disciplines that may not always be available to their students. Not because the students have done anything wrong and not because the instructors have done anything wrong, but because there is just this gap, this expert-novice gap that exists that, once you learn something and know something, it can be harder to teach that to someone who doesn't know that. And so, from my perspective, kind of thinking about engaging with students in these polarizing times, we really try to encourage instructors to think about, like, what are the experiences that our students are coming in with? What are the— what is the knowledge? What is the background that they are already coming in? What are the things that they do know that you can build on? Rather than saying, your perspective is wrong, your approach is wrong, it doesn't match what we do in the field, it doesn't match what we do in higher education. Encouraging instructors to think about students as coming in with very valuable backgrounds and perspectives, and how we can engage those rather than necessarily trying to impose some sort of, this is how it has to be done, or this is how it has to be understood.
Adrienne Warner [00:09:19]:
Yeah, I think I— in thinking about humility and trust and identity, these things all go so deep and to each of us personally. And some of the work around outdated notions and thinking about who to trust and who not to trust, right? We don't want to get hoodwinked, so we don't want to trust the wrong people, quote unquote, or the wrong information sources. So it can be a little bit of a defensive stance to be like, well, I don't trust them, or I don't trust this, but instead thinking about, like, well, who do I trust? Because we can't go through our lives as people in our day-to-day lives or in the classroom thinking everything through with no heuristics, no shortcuts, no things that we can rely on credibly and reliably to take us to information that we do trust. So, in my work, one of the vulnerable things that I've been trying to do is say, well, I trust this information source. I trust ProPublica's reporting on certain issues. You may not trust them, but who do you trust, and how did you gain that trust over time? Not as a judgment of, let me judge whether you're right or wrong for trusting that, but just bringing some sort of like self-reflection to who we do trust to just get through our lives; we have to trust. And I think reframing it from like, oh, don't fall into the trap, but instead into like, you have this cognitive authority that you can bestow on people, information sources, and that's a real position of power.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:12]:
Another area I would love to have you help us explore around outdated notions has to do with Wikipedia and Google Scholar. Let's start with Wikipedia. What are some of the outdated notions that we might have around that website, and perhaps how it might need to evolve?
Adrienne Warner [00:11:34]:
Yeah, I can jump in on this one. I think there are quite a few misconceptions that were once originally true about Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia is maybe 25 years old, and so much has happened in the past 25 years. In terms of how it's matured and the community that has evolved amongst the editors, whereas in the, in the olden days, 25 years ago, there were fewer guardrails. Really, people could jump on and sort of edit anything and put anything in there, and it, it was a little bit of the Wild West. And as the platform itself and technology has evolved, it's really become a quite stable and very fascinating encyclopedia that is revolutionizing access to information. And so one of the outdated notions that we hear a lot and continue to hear at times is that Wikipedia is bad. Don't cite Wikipedia, don't use it in your papers. And I think that it's more nuanced than that, actually.
Adrienne Warner [00:12:49]:
Wikipedia has a variety of quality control measures that they put into place, and one of them is a rating system for every single encyclopedia article on there, ranging at the top from featured article, which has hundreds if not thousands of edits and a robust discussion of the content on the talk page. So that's like the— that's like, those are really high-quality articles. And then there's an internal rating system that goes down to a good article, A class, B class, C class, stub. And the reason they have that internal rating system is to give some sense of how much time has been put into each article. So it's a real range of what people can encounter. And the other thing I will say, at every level of those quality control measures, there is human intervention, human and technological intervention. So you can, as a Wikipedia editor myself, I go in there from time to time and add things as I can or create new articles. I can put a watch on that, and I can watch the new edits that come in.
Adrienne Warner [00:14:07]:
And if I disagree, I can revert it back or start a discussion about that. And so I think, when we tell students Wikipedia is bad, not only are we classifying this gigantic complex encyclopedia as a monolith, which it's not, we're also somehow undercutting all other encyclopedias too. Like, don't use any encyclopedias in your scholarship or in your research for your class assignments or whatever. Even if we don't say that out loud or overtly, the students may be downloading that message. And we know that there are tons of encyclopedias that are specialized and general that have great information that students could really benefit from with their research.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:55]:
I'm curious, is there an area or a few areas that you particularly do a lot of editing in? I'm now curious about your life inside of Wikipedia.
Adrienne Warner [00:15:04]:
Oh, I love that question. It's a real hodgepodge. So I recently attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and there was this Art Nouveau vase, and the artist did not have a Wikipedia page. And I thought, Clément Massier, who are you? So I started to do research into this whole style of glazing, and I'm putting together a draft to make available in Wikipedia. But I've also edited on cactus and Maria Sibylla Merian, who researched butterflies and was an illustrator. It's kind of all over the place, but it's really like my— what I'm passionate about in those moments that I want to share with the world. It's like, oh, I read this great book, let me tell you about it. It's that same impulse.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:53]:
Oh, I love it. And Jane, are you— do you do any editing on Wikipedia or anything that you want to add to that before you share a bit about Google Scholar?
Jane Hammons [00:16:05]:
So I personally don't do any editing on Wikipedia, but I certainly agree with the points that Adrienne has made about Wikipedia potentially being a very valuable resource to our students. And if we cut that off completely, you just should never use that, we're really cutting them off from a source of information that could be incredibly helpful for them. Not just to get started with their research, but as a, you know, a destination for their research as well.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:32]:
And what do you want to share with us today about Google Scholar? Google Scholar good? Google Scholar bad? Does it make a good starting point? Are we terrible people if we start there?
Jane Hammons [00:16:42]:
So, you know, I think it's very similar to what, you know, with the comments around Wikipedia. I think if we give students a message that they should never use Google Scholar, we're cutting them off from a really important source of information. And my confession that I often make when I'm talking to other instructors, talking to librarians, I start every search with Google Scholar, right? I do not— I can't recall a time that I started a search for a topic using the library catalog or using library databases. I use Google Scholar to get an idea of what's out there on the topic, to identify sources, and then if I need to go find sources, then I go into the catalog and the databases to find them. But I start all of my searches with Google Scholar, and I think there's a lot— you can see a lot of guidance about Google Scholar. You can find examples, for example, on library websites where Google Scholar is directly compared to the library website or library databases, and always in a negative fashion, where the library databases it's gonna be more curated, and you're gonna find higher quality resources. And I don't wanna say that library databases are not great.
Jane Hammons [00:17:45]:
I don't wanna imply that at all. But we all know that you can find really not great articles in library databases, just as you can in using other sources. So for me, it's less about saying any of these tools are better than the other, but that they have different uses, they have different values, they can all be a really valuable part of the research experience. And especially if we think about something like Google Scholar or general Google searches, right, we know that most of our students are going to lose access to library databases after they graduate. They just won't have that access anymore. So if they're still gonna be doing research or engaging with scholarship, Google Scholar is still a place where they can go to find those resources that they may not have access to through library databases once they graduate. So I am definitely in the camp of let's not outright tell students that any types of sources are not valuable or search tools are not valuable, but have them think about, in the context of my research or what I'm doing, what is going to help me find the information that I need.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:49]:
Since it's true confessions time, I am going to make a true confession. When I was getting my doctorate, I took a philosophy class, and I hadn't taken a philosophy class since I was an undergraduate. And let's just say there was both a large span of time between these 2 educational adventures, and the undergraduate class I had taken was titled Philosophy of Love. So you could imagine it was more specialized, so I didn't get introduced to a lot of the philosophers that perhaps I quote-unquote should have, and I would start with every reading assignment in Wikipedia. And it just provided me with a really good overview of why this— who this person is that I'm about to read and why they might write the way they write, and then I could go into the more dense material. I'd have some kind of a foothold to carry me through, and there I know there are plenty of people out there who would say that that's not the way to do it and I have to train my brain, but that's the way did it and somehow, you know, managed to get along and really be introduced to a lot of philosophers that I think I otherwise would have been too intimidated by to just go straight in. And I mean, it's just a wonderful way to be introduced. Adrienne, you've made— are you going to do it? Are we going to go for 3 for 3? Is it true confession now? Are we all 3 going to confess something?
Adrienne Warner [00:20:08]:
I was just going to validate your confession in terms the needing the background information, and often we see this a lot with our students, is building up that background information is learning about the topic. And in your case, about particular philosophers, so that you have that firm foundation to jump off into more theoretical or abstract thought.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:32]:
All right, Jane, you have something to add, and then I definitely want to ask you about plagiarism as theft, but let's close off this topic before we get to that new one.
Jane Hammons [00:20:42]:
Yeah, so I'll just add in, you know, in terms of getting that background knowledge, there was a video that I can't remember which library put out years ago that like was like, you know, background searching is research. Like that is part of the research process. And I know Adrienne can talk a lot about this, but we know that scholarly articles have gotten harder to read. They are more specialized. They expect and assume more background knowledge right away. So if we're expecting our students to engage with scholarly articles, they're just not often going to have the background knowledge that is needed to be able to do that. And Wikipedia can be a great place to go to help them kind of bridge that gap that they have.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:21]:
I so appreciate that comment, Jane, and then ties with what Adrienne was alluding to earlier. What if instead of trying to cover the material, we got them curious? And what if that, whatever, whether it was Google Scholar and the overview that it provided or Wikipedia, actually sparked a curiosity that then got them contributing to the field eventually, as they began to have their specializations. I love that story of getting passionate about some of the things that you've done, some Wikipedia editing. Jane, there's another one we got to push back on, right? Or another one that you're going to help us do that on. Talk about plagiarism as theft.
Jane Hammons [00:22:02]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the plagiarism as theft metaphor is so common in higher education. You'll constantly see plagiarism being referred to as stealing, right? It's the same as stealing someone's car. Plagiarism, exactly the same as stealing someone's car, stealing someone's money, right? And it really criminalizes plagiarism. The way that plagiarism is often processed, like often dealt with at institutions, has a very similar manner to prosecution of an actual crime. There's, you know, students are cases and students are called before a judge or a jury that gives some sort of verdict of whether they committed plagiarism, right? And so it creates this very, from my perspective, this very hostile and negative attitude where the faculty member, the instructor, has to act like the plagiarism police. There was a great article years ago whose article author I can't remember, but, you know, talked about, you know, do you want to be the plagiarism police? Is that the role that you want to play as an instructor? And so I think it creates this negative atmosphere, this negative connection between the instructor and the student. If the instructor is always thinking, oh, my students are cheating, and the students are always thinking, my instructor's gonna think I'm cheating, they're gonna think I'm plagiarizing. And I think it really inhibits learning to talk about plagiarism as theft, right? In other areas, students are allowed to make mistakes.
Jane Hammons [00:23:24]:
They are expected to make mistakes. We know that making mistakes is how we learn. And yet we have these very complex and complicated rules about what plagiarism is and plagiarism is not, which we all can't agree on ourselves as academics. And yet we expect our students, from the very beginning of their academic careers often, to understand these complex rules about plagiarism and what you're supposed to cite and when you're supposed to cite it and how you're supposed to cite it, even though we can't agree on that ourselves and even though we struggle to follow the guidelines ourselves, for how to cite correctly and when to cite correctly. And then we prosecute students if they can't follow those guidelines. So that's one of the outdated notions that I've really tried to highlight a lot over the last couple years is, can we move away from this idea of talking about plagiarism as theft and sort of branding our students as criminals for making mistakes and not being able to understand exactly right away how to engage in these scholarly conversations?
Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:24]:
One more area for us to potentially rethink things before we get to the recommendations segment, and that has to do with scholarly articles as the gold standard. Adrienne, you and Alyssa Russo question whether treating peer-reviewed articles as the gold standard for undergraduates is perhaps the best and only way to go. Talk about what's wrong when we require scholarly articles too early.
Adrienne Warner [00:24:55]:
Yeah, so there's a couple of things that I think we could stand to rethink around scholarly articles with undergraduates, and especially with early undergraduates who may be taking general education courses. One of the things that we've researched is how students transition from high school to college, and by we I mean not Alyssa and I, but librarians in higher education, especially Project Information Literacy did this amazing study about what students coming into college being prepared to do in terms of research? And these— we all know that scholarly articles are difficult and dense; they're theoretical and abstract, they have all kinds of new words that students may not be familiar with, and new meanings of words that they may be familiar with but take on whole different understandings, and depending on which field you're in... I'll give you an example. The science of reading is very different than reading science. And I didn't know that until months into research. So I think when we're asking students who are not familiar with these information formats, who they're geared for, all of the conversations that have come before this thing has made it into the world, and not only should they read it, quote-unquote, just read, but they should synthesize multiple of these sources into their own brilliant thought or thesis statement or resources that they quote in their paper. We're asking too much, and we're starting them in this really, really deep end of information and research, and I understand, I think, why. I mean, I used to kind of show students scholarly articles to kind of show that awe factor of like, wow, look how difficult these are, and these represent higher education, and now you're in higher education, so isn't it cool that we grapple with these really hard things? And yes, I think that is true that we can grapple with really hard things, but not treating these scholarly articles as things that they were never intended to do.
Adrienne Warner [00:27:22]:
They're never intended to teach background information or to teach— to talk to students. They're expert-to-expert communication. And so I think when we're thinking especially about undergraduates, it's like, how can we scaffold up different information formats? I mentioned encyclopedias and dictionaries, but also there are amazing handbooks that are written with general language, magazine articles, newspaper articles. Let's get these students learning about their topic in approachable ways before dumping them off into this abstract, dense stuff. And I will say one other thing, just that I think that the impetus to do this comes from a really great place. We want students to engage with research right away, like undergraduate research as a high-impact practice and CURES and all these different ways to get folks involved in research early on. But we need to broaden our definition of research. Research is not only represented in scholarly articles or in wet labs or whatever.
Adrienne Warner [00:28:33]:
It's represented in thinking and reading and talking. And so I think if we can broaden out our definition of what research is in the context of higher ed, then we'll open ourselves up to considering many more types of sources for our students.
Jane Hammons [00:28:51]:
And I'll add in, so in case, you know, folks are skeptical about the points that Adrienne's making, one of the ways that I've tried to get this across with instructors that I've worked with- I've done this activity in different, you know, is assign them to read a scholarly article outside of their field, right? And right away it becomes clear that, oh, you're an English professor, I'm gonna have you read this chemistry article and explain what this is talking about. And then, you know, remind them that their students are taking 5 different classes and being expected to read scholarly articles in 5 different areas and understand them at the same time. And that can be really helpful, really eye-opening to the instructors, to recognize how familiar they've gotten with reading scholarly articles in their field and how easy it is for them and how difficult it is when they have to step out of their discipline and try to do something like that.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:43]:
Before Adrian, Jane, and I get to the recommendations segment, I just wanted to take a moment and thank Poll Everywhere for your partnership with Teaching in Higher Ed. And now for the fun part where I get to share a tip to accompany that partnership. And I would like to make mine related to what we're talking about today, and that is when we're discussing either library resources or introducing research, I like using the ranking function, a ranking poll. This could be anything from, maybe you've had students do some type of an abstract or locate something, a source of some kind, and then you could bring those in and have students examine them, analyze them, and then rank them from, perhaps, something like most credible to least credible or some other type of measure. And that can really give them an opportunity before they start doing a lot of creation themselves to begin to have a little bit more of a sense of what it takes for something to be credible or what it takes for something to be of high quality or what have you. I want to thank once again Poll Everywhere for your partnership, and I'm so looking forward to the next time when I get to share a tip with the Teaching and Higher Ed community. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I have one. This is one of those things, of course, now that I know that it exists, it's obvious to me that it would exist, but I didn't know that it existed, and I am so glad to know that it is. I heard about this website from Alan Levine, who has a wonderful RSS feed of really cool tech— oh, I always get it wrong because it just comes into my RSS feeds.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:42]:
But anyway, thank you to Alan Levine for always feeding me such good websites. So this is called What Cable, and it's whatcable.uk, and it's a free menu bar app that tells you in plain English what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do. And I do realize that not everyone who listens is on a Mac. I mean, we should just go and see if there is the equivalent on Windows, but just the fact that this exists is so wonderful. I have run into this where I used to think that if the cable fit into whatever device it is on one end and the other end fit into the other end, so if it was a USB-C to USB-C, that they were all the same. They are not all the same. And even I then thought I had it all figured out, and I thought, well, it's either going to carry data with it, or it's going to carry a charge with it.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:44]:
As well as data. Oh, no, no, no. There's actually different levels of charges that can be achieved through USB-C cables. So not all cables are the same. And WhatCable can help us figure out, cable by cable, what is this particular cable that is plugged in, capable of doing? And I just, I cannot wait until the next time it solves a problem. I was like, I needed this so bad for many years now. And I'm excited to know that it exists. And now I get to pass it over to Jane for whatever you would like to recommend.
Jane Hammons [00:33:17]:
Great. So the first thing that came to mind, which is really highlighted by the fact that the feels-like temperature here in Ohio today is 105, is a book that I'm currently reading that's called Fire Weather by John Vaillant. I apologize if I mispronounced the last name, but really looking at the impact that we as humans have had on the environment and how that has created the conditions that we see with such incredibly powerful and long-lasting wildfires that we've had in the last few years. And it really looks specifically at a 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Canada, that was just absolutely insane in terms of the level of intensity and the amount that it burned, and really just highlighting that we now live in an age where, pretty much anything can catch on fire at any time and last a very long time. So I think it's been a really great and interesting read thinking about the kind of weather that we are experiencing here in Ohio right now.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:19]:
Thank you, Jane, for that important read. And Adrienne, what would you like to recommend today?
Adrienne Warner [00:34:24]:
Yes, it's a novel. I love her work. The novel's called The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff, and it's a historical survival novel about this young girl who is a servant and escapes in the 1600s the Jamestown colony, and she goes and lives in the, in the wilds, and how she does that and the ingenious way she does that. And it's a really beautiful meditation on what it means to be alone and to be in community, and to be alone with one's thoughts and what it means to survive and what keeps us alive. And I just think Lauren Groff's writing is, is so beautiful. I still think about that book every day.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:11]:
And before we close out the episode, I would love to have either or both of you share if people want to learn more about some of the ways of rethinking that you shared. I know you have a couple of toolkits or resources that we might point people to, and I can include those in the show notes, including one having to do with Cookie Monster.
Jane Hammons [00:35:30]:
Uh, yeah, so we, you know, we've developed, uh, different activities and resources. We have articles that we've tried to share, presentations that we've tried to share on different outdated notions. And one of the activities that I've used in the past is, Sesame Street had years ago a video called Cookie Monster in the Library, where Cookie Monster goes into the library and the librarian tells him, you know, we only have books here. We don't have cookies. We only have books. And Cookie Monster keeps asking for cookies, and the librarian gets completely frustrated because we only have books. And one of the activities that I've done with students and I've encouraged instructors to do, like, have your students update that. How does that not fit what a modern-day academic library is, or a library in general? Like, what are the ways that libraries are different? What would be the new script if Cookie Monster went into the library? And that, you know, when I did that with students, they really loved it, and it was a way to them to have fun, but also to see that, hey, libraries are not what they were in the past. Most libraries, you can find cookies somewhere in the library.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:34]:
I love that exercise so much! And if I were— I have to just say that the most creative thing I have ever heard of, of a library having, is a carpet shampoo machine, because most of us wouldn't have the space to store something like that or perhaps purchase that in our own homes. And that was one of the most creative things I've ever heard of a library have. I'm excited because our kids have recently gotten excited about libraries because of the availability of digital books. And even we upgraded a bit, not to, you know, make people feel left out, but now we have 2 library cards, because there's the one that's part of our larger Orange County library system within California, but then we also have the Mission Viejo Library, which is one of my favorite all-time libraries. And so if we're looking for a particular digital book that's very popular with people, it can kind of have you standing in 2 waiting lines to get a book or an audiobook all at once. So yeah, carpet shampooers, and if you're in a place where you can get more than one library card, I have to recommend that too. And Adrienne, you've got something to add to our list of things to perhaps follow up on as well.
Adrienne Warner [00:37:44]:
I just wanted to mention Jane's amazing instructor development series called Teaching Information Literacy. You could probably Google that through Ohio State. And Jane brings on so many wonderful speakers and has her own content that she shares through that. There's an archive that's really built up, and I've learned so much from that series. So I hope people check that out too.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:08]:
Oh, thank you so much. Thanks to both of you for being guests today on Teaching in Higher Ed. I've got so many things I want to go do as soon as we hang up. Thank you so much for your time.
Adrienne Warner [00:38:18]:
Thank you, Bonni.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:22]:
Thanks once again to Jane Hammons and Adrienne Warner for joining me on today's episode. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroeger. I want to encourage you, as we- many of us- look to a new academic year, to join me in the Field Guide. You can do that by heading over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You'll get to hear each week what I've wondered, what I've noted, what I've listened to, what I have read, and I so am enjoying hearing back from you on my questions where I'm wondering and wrestling. Thanks to all of you who have written back, and I look forward to hearing from more of you.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:08]:
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.
Today on episode number 634 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Outdated Research Notions with Jane Hammons and Adrienne Warner.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:13]:
Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:21]:
Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed, Episode 634. Most of us picked up a set of rules about research somewhere along the way. Don't use Wikipedia.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:02]:
Google Scholar is never the way to start. Find a peer-reviewed article, and you're on solid ground. Some of that advice has stopped working as effectively as it might once have, and a little of it may never have worked the way we had hoped. My guests today have spent the last few years naming these outdated notions and offering more beneficial approaches in their place. Jane Hammons is the Head of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University Libraries, where her research focuses on the meeting point of information literacy and faculty development. Adrienne Warner is an Undergraduate Engagement Librarian and Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico, whose work centers on how students find their footing and their sense of belonging as researchers. Together, they have led Outdated Research Notions workshops across the country and beyond, and I am so glad to have them both here.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:07]:
Thanks also to Mandi Goodsett from Cleveland State University. She heard me make a mention when I had Rebecca Fordon, another librarian, on. I said something about not having had enough librarians on recent years. And Mandi, as you're about to hear, your recommendation was perfect. Thank you again for reaching out and for introducing me to Jane and Adrienne. Jane and Adrienne, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.
Adrienne Warner [00:02:40]:
Thank you so much for having us.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:43]:
All right, that was Adrienne that started off, and Jane, for the purposes of our podcast editor and production support person, who will be trying to put voices together. What a joy it is to talk with each of you today. We're going to start out with the theme of outdated notions. Adrienne, why don't we start with you? Tell us a little bit about how you got interested and curious about what outdated notions all of us may be carrying around about our work.
Adrienne Warner [00:03:16]:
Absolutely. So let's go back in time to 2021. And my colleagues here at the University of New Mexico and I were prepping for an instructor development workshop series, and we came across this white paper from Stanford School of Education. And this white paper was written by Wineburg, Breakstone, and Ziv, and they listed some— what they didn't say outdated notions, they said some traps that students can fall into and kind of get hoodwinked.
Adrienne Warner [00:03:52]:
And they listed some of them out, and I recognized some of those in my work with students, and I thought, what if we just made a list of what we're seeing students come to us with in terms of bottlenecks or misunderstandings about how to evaluate credibility and information that they're finding online? And so, because we work with a bunch of different students, especially early undergraduates, we've gotten a lot of this anecdata about what students are getting hung up on, and we thought, okay, if we made our list, how would it compare with Breakstone and his colleagues? And then we decided, what if we talked about this in our information literacy workshops here on campus? And then maybe we should talk about it in a broader setting, taking it to conferences and whatnot, to see—
Bonni Stachowiak [00:04:45]:
Right.
Adrienne Warner [00:04:46]:
if it would gain any traction outside of our local context, and it did. And that's when we met Jane in 2023. And since then, we've really been talking a lot about various outdated notions, some controversial notions, and also evolving our own understanding about how these notions may be affecting students. And I will say that I, I have taught some of these, right? Like, I have taught outdated notions, not believing that they were outdated or not seeing that there was anything wrong with them. And I think that's entirely human, right? Like, we all want to do the best by our students. We want to give the best advice, the best pro tips for how to approach that crazy information landscape online, who to trust, what not to trust. And so we're all coming at this with a very human and very, like, positive approach. And so, it's taken a lot of reflection and thought about, like, what, what am I doing in my practice and what could I improve on? And I think it's a little bit similar to how fields evolve, right? We don't teach learning styles anymore.
Adrienne Warner [00:06:02]:
We don't teach visual, kinesthetic, and all that stuff because we know that Universal Design is actually a better approach now. And it's not that everyone was wrong when they were doing the best they could with the information they had at the time in learning styles, but just that when we got new information, we could have the opportunity to change our practices in the classroom.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:25]:
Oh, I want to pick up on a word, and Jane, I'm going to kick it over to you in a minute. I want to pick up on a word that Adrienne used from that article that kind of kicked much of this off. It's the word hoodwinked. And it's very similar to the word that Mike Caulfield introduced to me, or this whole concept of— because we're teaching in such polarized times, and I just found it so helpful to shift the way that I present some of these skills and strategies around information literacy, rather than this is right and this is wrong, to do it out of kindness that none of us wants to get hoodwinked. I love that word. None of us wants to get tricked or that kind of a thing, to almost shift the conversation where it's not a right-wrong conversation and much more out of care for the person. And then I also heard Adrian talking about the humility that can be so wonderful to infuse. What's coming up for you, Jane, in terms of how we might position ourselves when working with students to adapt to the polarizing times that we find ourselves in?
Jane Hammons [00:07:41]:
So I would say, for me, so much of my work is these days not actually working directly with students, but working with course instructors and working with faculty members in sort of more of a faculty developer role. So in that context, you know, I try to encourage the faculty members to recognize that they have developed over the years a great deal of expertise and knowledge about how to engage with information in their fields, how to engage with information in their disciplines that may not always be available to their students. Not because the students have done anything wrong and not because the instructors have done anything wrong, but because there is just this gap, this expert-novice gap that exists that, once you learn something and know something, it can be harder to teach that to someone who doesn't know that. And so, from my perspective, kind of thinking about engaging with students in these polarizing times, we really try to encourage instructors to think about, like, what are the experiences that our students are coming in with? What are the— what is the knowledge? What is the background that they are already coming in? What are the things that they do know that you can build on? Rather than saying, your perspective is wrong, your approach is wrong, it doesn't match what we do in the field, it doesn't match what we do in higher education. Encouraging instructors to think about students as coming in with very valuable backgrounds and perspectives, and how we can engage those rather than necessarily trying to impose some sort of, this is how it has to be done, or this is how it has to be understood.
Adrienne Warner [00:09:19]:
Yeah, I think I— in thinking about humility and trust and identity, these things all go so deep and to each of us personally. And some of the work around outdated notions and thinking about who to trust and who not to trust, right? We don't want to get hoodwinked, so we don't want to trust the wrong people, quote unquote, or the wrong information sources. So it can be a little bit of a defensive stance to be like, well, I don't trust them, or I don't trust this, but instead thinking about, like, well, who do I trust? Because we can't go through our lives as people in our day-to-day lives or in the classroom thinking everything through with no heuristics, no shortcuts, no things that we can rely on credibly and reliably to take us to information that we do trust. So, in my work, one of the vulnerable things that I've been trying to do is say, well, I trust this information source. I trust ProPublica's reporting on certain issues. You may not trust them, but who do you trust, and how did you gain that trust over time? Not as a judgment of, let me judge whether you're right or wrong for trusting that, but just bringing some sort of like self-reflection to who we do trust to just get through our lives; we have to trust. And I think reframing it from like, oh, don't fall into the trap, but instead into like, you have this cognitive authority that you can bestow on people, information sources, and that's a real position of power.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:11:12]:
Another area I would love to have you help us explore around outdated notions has to do with Wikipedia and Google Scholar. Let's start with Wikipedia. What are some of the outdated notions that we might have around that website, and perhaps how it might need to evolve?
Adrienne Warner [00:11:34]:
Yeah, I can jump in on this one. I think there are quite a few misconceptions that were once originally true about Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia is maybe 25 years old, and so much has happened in the past 25 years. In terms of how it's matured and the community that has evolved amongst the editors, whereas in the, in the olden days, 25 years ago, there were fewer guardrails. Really, people could jump on and sort of edit anything and put anything in there, and it, it was a little bit of the Wild West. And as the platform itself and technology has evolved, it's really become a quite stable and very fascinating encyclopedia that is revolutionizing access to information. And so one of the outdated notions that we hear a lot and continue to hear at times is that Wikipedia is bad. Don't cite Wikipedia, don't use it in your papers. And I think that it's more nuanced than that, actually.
Adrienne Warner [00:12:49]:
Wikipedia has a variety of quality control measures that they put into place, and one of them is a rating system for every single encyclopedia article on there, ranging at the top from featured article, which has hundreds if not thousands of edits and a robust discussion of the content on the talk page. So that's like the— that's like, those are really high-quality articles. And then there's an internal rating system that goes down to a good article, A class, B class, C class, stub. And the reason they have that internal rating system is to give some sense of how much time has been put into each article. So it's a real range of what people can encounter. And the other thing I will say, at every level of those quality control measures, there is human intervention, human and technological intervention. So you can, as a Wikipedia editor myself, I go in there from time to time and add things as I can or create new articles. I can put a watch on that, and I can watch the new edits that come in.
Adrienne Warner [00:14:07]:
And if I disagree, I can revert it back or start a discussion about that. And so I think, when we tell students Wikipedia is bad, not only are we classifying this gigantic complex encyclopedia as a monolith, which it's not, we're also somehow undercutting all other encyclopedias too. Like, don't use any encyclopedias in your scholarship or in your research for your class assignments or whatever. Even if we don't say that out loud or overtly, the students may be downloading that message. And we know that there are tons of encyclopedias that are specialized and general that have great information that students could really benefit from with their research.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:14:55]:
I'm curious, is there an area or a few areas that you particularly do a lot of editing in? I'm now curious about your life inside of Wikipedia.
Adrienne Warner [00:15:04]:
Oh, I love that question. It's a real hodgepodge. So I recently attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and there was this Art Nouveau vase, and the artist did not have a Wikipedia page. And I thought, Clément Massier, who are you? So I started to do research into this whole style of glazing, and I'm putting together a draft to make available in Wikipedia. But I've also edited on cactus and Maria Sibylla Merian, who researched butterflies and was an illustrator. It's kind of all over the place, but it's really like my— what I'm passionate about in those moments that I want to share with the world. It's like, oh, I read this great book, let me tell you about it. It's that same impulse.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:15:53]:
Oh, I love it. And Jane, are you— do you do any editing on Wikipedia or anything that you want to add to that before you share a bit about Google Scholar?
Jane Hammons [00:16:05]:
So I personally don't do any editing on Wikipedia, but I certainly agree with the points that Adrienne has made about Wikipedia potentially being a very valuable resource to our students. And if we cut that off completely, you just should never use that, we're really cutting them off from a source of information that could be incredibly helpful for them. Not just to get started with their research, but as a, you know, a destination for their research as well.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:32]:
And what do you want to share with us today about Google Scholar? Google Scholar good? Google Scholar bad? Does it make a good starting point? Are we terrible people if we start there?
Jane Hammons [00:16:42]:
So, you know, I think it's very similar to what, you know, with the comments around Wikipedia. I think if we give students a message that they should never use Google Scholar, we're cutting them off from a really important source of information. And my confession that I often make when I'm talking to other instructors, talking to librarians, I start every search with Google Scholar, right? I do not— I can't recall a time that I started a search for a topic using the library catalog or using library databases. I use Google Scholar to get an idea of what's out there on the topic, to identify sources, and then if I need to go find sources, then I go into the catalog and the databases to find them. But I start all of my searches with Google Scholar, and I think there's a lot— you can see a lot of guidance about Google Scholar. You can find examples, for example, on library websites where Google Scholar is directly compared to the library website or library databases, and always in a negative fashion, where the library databases it's gonna be more curated, and you're gonna find higher quality resources. And I don't wanna say that library databases are not great.
Jane Hammons [00:17:45]:
I don't wanna imply that at all. But we all know that you can find really not great articles in library databases, just as you can in using other sources. So for me, it's less about saying any of these tools are better than the other, but that they have different uses, they have different values, they can all be a really valuable part of the research experience. And especially if we think about something like Google Scholar or general Google searches, right, we know that most of our students are going to lose access to library databases after they graduate. They just won't have that access anymore. So if they're still gonna be doing research or engaging with scholarship, Google Scholar is still a place where they can go to find those resources that they may not have access to through library databases once they graduate. So I am definitely in the camp of let's not outright tell students that any types of sources are not valuable or search tools are not valuable, but have them think about, in the context of my research or what I'm doing, what is going to help me find the information that I need.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:18:49]:
Since it's true confessions time, I am going to make a true confession. When I was getting my doctorate, I took a philosophy class, and I hadn't taken a philosophy class since I was an undergraduate. And let's just say there was both a large span of time between these 2 educational adventures, and the undergraduate class I had taken was titled Philosophy of Love. So you could imagine it was more specialized, so I didn't get introduced to a lot of the philosophers that perhaps I quote-unquote should have, and I would start with every reading assignment in Wikipedia. And it just provided me with a really good overview of why this— who this person is that I'm about to read and why they might write the way they write, and then I could go into the more dense material. I'd have some kind of a foothold to carry me through, and there I know there are plenty of people out there who would say that that's not the way to do it and I have to train my brain, but that's the way did it and somehow, you know, managed to get along and really be introduced to a lot of philosophers that I think I otherwise would have been too intimidated by to just go straight in. And I mean, it's just a wonderful way to be introduced. Adrienne, you've made— are you going to do it? Are we going to go for 3 for 3? Is it true confession now? Are we all 3 going to confess something?
Adrienne Warner [00:20:08]:
I was just going to validate your confession in terms the needing the background information, and often we see this a lot with our students, is building up that background information is learning about the topic. And in your case, about particular philosophers, so that you have that firm foundation to jump off into more theoretical or abstract thought.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:32]:
All right, Jane, you have something to add, and then I definitely want to ask you about plagiarism as theft, but let's close off this topic before we get to that new one.
Jane Hammons [00:20:42]:
Yeah, so I'll just add in, you know, in terms of getting that background knowledge, there was a video that I can't remember which library put out years ago that like was like, you know, background searching is research. Like that is part of the research process. And I know Adrienne can talk a lot about this, but we know that scholarly articles have gotten harder to read. They are more specialized. They expect and assume more background knowledge right away. So if we're expecting our students to engage with scholarly articles, they're just not often going to have the background knowledge that is needed to be able to do that. And Wikipedia can be a great place to go to help them kind of bridge that gap that they have.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:21]:
I so appreciate that comment, Jane, and then ties with what Adrienne was alluding to earlier. What if instead of trying to cover the material, we got them curious? And what if that, whatever, whether it was Google Scholar and the overview that it provided or Wikipedia, actually sparked a curiosity that then got them contributing to the field eventually, as they began to have their specializations. I love that story of getting passionate about some of the things that you've done, some Wikipedia editing. Jane, there's another one we got to push back on, right? Or another one that you're going to help us do that on. Talk about plagiarism as theft.
Jane Hammons [00:22:02]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the plagiarism as theft metaphor is so common in higher education. You'll constantly see plagiarism being referred to as stealing, right? It's the same as stealing someone's car. Plagiarism, exactly the same as stealing someone's car, stealing someone's money, right? And it really criminalizes plagiarism. The way that plagiarism is often processed, like often dealt with at institutions, has a very similar manner to prosecution of an actual crime. There's, you know, students are cases and students are called before a judge or a jury that gives some sort of verdict of whether they committed plagiarism, right? And so it creates this very, from my perspective, this very hostile and negative attitude where the faculty member, the instructor, has to act like the plagiarism police. There was a great article years ago whose article author I can't remember, but, you know, talked about, you know, do you want to be the plagiarism police? Is that the role that you want to play as an instructor? And so I think it creates this negative atmosphere, this negative connection between the instructor and the student. If the instructor is always thinking, oh, my students are cheating, and the students are always thinking, my instructor's gonna think I'm cheating, they're gonna think I'm plagiarizing. And I think it really inhibits learning to talk about plagiarism as theft, right? In other areas, students are allowed to make mistakes.
Jane Hammons [00:23:24]:
They are expected to make mistakes. We know that making mistakes is how we learn. And yet we have these very complex and complicated rules about what plagiarism is and plagiarism is not, which we all can't agree on ourselves as academics. And yet we expect our students, from the very beginning of their academic careers often, to understand these complex rules about plagiarism and what you're supposed to cite and when you're supposed to cite it and how you're supposed to cite it, even though we can't agree on that ourselves and even though we struggle to follow the guidelines ourselves, for how to cite correctly and when to cite correctly. And then we prosecute students if they can't follow those guidelines. So that's one of the outdated notions that I've really tried to highlight a lot over the last couple years is, can we move away from this idea of talking about plagiarism as theft and sort of branding our students as criminals for making mistakes and not being able to understand exactly right away how to engage in these scholarly conversations?
Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:24]:
One more area for us to potentially rethink things before we get to the recommendations segment, and that has to do with scholarly articles as the gold standard. Adrienne, you and Alyssa Russo question whether treating peer-reviewed articles as the gold standard for undergraduates is perhaps the best and only way to go. Talk about what's wrong when we require scholarly articles too early.
Adrienne Warner [00:24:55]:
Yeah, so there's a couple of things that I think we could stand to rethink around scholarly articles with undergraduates, and especially with early undergraduates who may be taking general education courses. One of the things that we've researched is how students transition from high school to college, and by we I mean not Alyssa and I, but librarians in higher education, especially Project Information Literacy did this amazing study about what students coming into college being prepared to do in terms of research? And these— we all know that scholarly articles are difficult and dense; they're theoretical and abstract, they have all kinds of new words that students may not be familiar with, and new meanings of words that they may be familiar with but take on whole different understandings, and depending on which field you're in... I'll give you an example. The science of reading is very different than reading science. And I didn't know that until months into research. So I think when we're asking students who are not familiar with these information formats, who they're geared for, all of the conversations that have come before this thing has made it into the world, and not only should they read it, quote-unquote, just read, but they should synthesize multiple of these sources into their own brilliant thought or thesis statement or resources that they quote in their paper. We're asking too much, and we're starting them in this really, really deep end of information and research, and I understand, I think, why. I mean, I used to kind of show students scholarly articles to kind of show that awe factor of like, wow, look how difficult these are, and these represent higher education, and now you're in higher education, so isn't it cool that we grapple with these really hard things? And yes, I think that is true that we can grapple with really hard things, but not treating these scholarly articles as things that they were never intended to do.
Adrienne Warner [00:27:22]:
They're never intended to teach background information or to teach— to talk to students. They're expert-to-expert communication. And so I think when we're thinking especially about undergraduates, it's like, how can we scaffold up different information formats? I mentioned encyclopedias and dictionaries, but also there are amazing handbooks that are written with general language, magazine articles, newspaper articles. Let's get these students learning about their topic in approachable ways before dumping them off into this abstract, dense stuff. And I will say one other thing, just that I think that the impetus to do this comes from a really great place. We want students to engage with research right away, like undergraduate research as a high-impact practice and CURES and all these different ways to get folks involved in research early on. But we need to broaden our definition of research. Research is not only represented in scholarly articles or in wet labs or whatever.
Adrienne Warner [00:28:33]:
It's represented in thinking and reading and talking. And so I think if we can broaden out our definition of what research is in the context of higher ed, then we'll open ourselves up to considering many more types of sources for our students.
Jane Hammons [00:28:51]:
And I'll add in, so in case, you know, folks are skeptical about the points that Adrienne's making, one of the ways that I've tried to get this across with instructors that I've worked with- I've done this activity in different, you know, is assign them to read a scholarly article outside of their field, right? And right away it becomes clear that, oh, you're an English professor, I'm gonna have you read this chemistry article and explain what this is talking about. And then, you know, remind them that their students are taking 5 different classes and being expected to read scholarly articles in 5 different areas and understand them at the same time. And that can be really helpful, really eye-opening to the instructors, to recognize how familiar they've gotten with reading scholarly articles in their field and how easy it is for them and how difficult it is when they have to step out of their discipline and try to do something like that.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:29:43]:
Before Adrian, Jane, and I get to the recommendations segment, I just wanted to take a moment and thank Poll Everywhere for your partnership with Teaching in Higher Ed. And now for the fun part where I get to share a tip to accompany that partnership. And I would like to make mine related to what we're talking about today, and that is when we're discussing either library resources or introducing research, I like using the ranking function, a ranking poll. This could be anything from, maybe you've had students do some type of an abstract or locate something, a source of some kind, and then you could bring those in and have students examine them, analyze them, and then rank them from, perhaps, something like most credible to least credible or some other type of measure. And that can really give them an opportunity before they start doing a lot of creation themselves to begin to have a little bit more of a sense of what it takes for something to be credible or what it takes for something to be of high quality or what have you. I want to thank once again Poll Everywhere for your partnership, and I'm so looking forward to the next time when I get to share a tip with the Teaching and Higher Ed community. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I have one. This is one of those things, of course, now that I know that it exists, it's obvious to me that it would exist, but I didn't know that it existed, and I am so glad to know that it is. I heard about this website from Alan Levine, who has a wonderful RSS feed of really cool tech— oh, I always get it wrong because it just comes into my RSS feeds.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:31:42]:
But anyway, thank you to Alan Levine for always feeding me such good websites. So this is called What Cable, and it's whatcable.uk, and it's a free menu bar app that tells you in plain English what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do. And I do realize that not everyone who listens is on a Mac. I mean, we should just go and see if there is the equivalent on Windows, but just the fact that this exists is so wonderful. I have run into this where I used to think that if the cable fit into whatever device it is on one end and the other end fit into the other end, so if it was a USB-C to USB-C, that they were all the same. They are not all the same. And even I then thought I had it all figured out, and I thought, well, it's either going to carry data with it, or it's going to carry a charge with it.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:32:44]:
As well as data. Oh, no, no, no. There's actually different levels of charges that can be achieved through USB-C cables. So not all cables are the same. And WhatCable can help us figure out, cable by cable, what is this particular cable that is plugged in, capable of doing? And I just, I cannot wait until the next time it solves a problem. I was like, I needed this so bad for many years now. And I'm excited to know that it exists. And now I get to pass it over to Jane for whatever you would like to recommend.
Jane Hammons [00:33:17]:
Great. So the first thing that came to mind, which is really highlighted by the fact that the feels-like temperature here in Ohio today is 105, is a book that I'm currently reading that's called Fire Weather by John Vaillant. I apologize if I mispronounced the last name, but really looking at the impact that we as humans have had on the environment and how that has created the conditions that we see with such incredibly powerful and long-lasting wildfires that we've had in the last few years. And it really looks specifically at a 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Canada, that was just absolutely insane in terms of the level of intensity and the amount that it burned, and really just highlighting that we now live in an age where, pretty much anything can catch on fire at any time and last a very long time. So I think it's been a really great and interesting read thinking about the kind of weather that we are experiencing here in Ohio right now.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:19]:
Thank you, Jane, for that important read. And Adrienne, what would you like to recommend today?
Adrienne Warner [00:34:24]:
Yes, it's a novel. I love her work. The novel's called The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff, and it's a historical survival novel about this young girl who is a servant and escapes in the 1600s the Jamestown colony, and she goes and lives in the, in the wilds, and how she does that and the ingenious way she does that. And it's a really beautiful meditation on what it means to be alone and to be in community, and to be alone with one's thoughts and what it means to survive and what keeps us alive. And I just think Lauren Groff's writing is, is so beautiful. I still think about that book every day.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:11]:
And before we close out the episode, I would love to have either or both of you share if people want to learn more about some of the ways of rethinking that you shared. I know you have a couple of toolkits or resources that we might point people to, and I can include those in the show notes, including one having to do with Cookie Monster.
Jane Hammons [00:35:30]:
Uh, yeah, so we, you know, we've developed, uh, different activities and resources. We have articles that we've tried to share, presentations that we've tried to share on different outdated notions. And one of the activities that I've used in the past is, Sesame Street had years ago a video called Cookie Monster in the Library, where Cookie Monster goes into the library and the librarian tells him, you know, we only have books here. We don't have cookies. We only have books. And Cookie Monster keeps asking for cookies, and the librarian gets completely frustrated because we only have books. And one of the activities that I've done with students and I've encouraged instructors to do, like, have your students update that. How does that not fit what a modern-day academic library is, or a library in general? Like, what are the ways that libraries are different? What would be the new script if Cookie Monster went into the library? And that, you know, when I did that with students, they really loved it, and it was a way to them to have fun, but also to see that, hey, libraries are not what they were in the past. Most libraries, you can find cookies somewhere in the library.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:34]:
I love that exercise so much! And if I were— I have to just say that the most creative thing I have ever heard of, of a library having, is a carpet shampoo machine, because most of us wouldn't have the space to store something like that or perhaps purchase that in our own homes. And that was one of the most creative things I've ever heard of a library have. I'm excited because our kids have recently gotten excited about libraries because of the availability of digital books. And even we upgraded a bit, not to, you know, make people feel left out, but now we have 2 library cards, because there's the one that's part of our larger Orange County library system within California, but then we also have the Mission Viejo Library, which is one of my favorite all-time libraries. And so if we're looking for a particular digital book that's very popular with people, it can kind of have you standing in 2 waiting lines to get a book or an audiobook all at once. So yeah, carpet shampooers, and if you're in a place where you can get more than one library card, I have to recommend that too. And Adrienne, you've got something to add to our list of things to perhaps follow up on as well.
Adrienne Warner [00:37:44]:
I just wanted to mention Jane's amazing instructor development series called Teaching Information Literacy. You could probably Google that through Ohio State. And Jane brings on so many wonderful speakers and has her own content that she shares through that. There's an archive that's really built up, and I've learned so much from that series. So I hope people check that out too.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:08]:
Oh, thank you so much. Thanks to both of you for being guests today on Teaching in Higher Ed. I've got so many things I want to go do as soon as we hang up. Thank you so much for your time.
Adrienne Warner [00:38:18]:
Thank you, Bonni.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:38:22]:
Thanks once again to Jane Hammons and Adrienne Warner for joining me on today's episode. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroeger. I want to encourage you, as we- many of us- look to a new academic year, to join me in the Field Guide. You can do that by heading over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You'll get to hear each week what I've wondered, what I've noted, what I've listened to, what I have read, and I so am enjoying hearing back from you on my questions where I'm wondering and wrestling. Thanks to all of you who have written back, and I look forward to hearing from more of you.
Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:08]:
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.
