SAU Bulletin
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Date
2025-06-09
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IQAC SAU
Abstract
All of us feel overwhelmed, at one point or another, by the seemingly unstoppable accumulation of mail in our inboxes, the stream of news coming at us from so many directions, often feeding yet more news across cryptic flowing banners, the mysterious switchbacks we encounter as we navigate common medical advice – that thing that was good for you? It’s not, after all – and the frustration of hearing two equally passionate sides to every debate, when we know the truth doesn’t come in neat binaries. Information is too much with us, and too much of it is trivial or dubious or drawn from unconvincing evidence. But when we need to figure things out, we do the research.
Description
Those of us teaching first-year college students usually confront another problem that also feels overwhelming at times. Students have always had trouble writing research papers, but on top of the usual culprits – choosing topics that are too narrow or too broad, providing a data-dump rather than an analysis, misusing words, splicing sentences together with commas when they aren’t fragmenting them – we have to help them find their way through an abundant but increasingly complex information environment. Instead of going to the library, students go to Google, where scholarly sources, advocacy, government documents, personal narratives, news sources, scans of nineteenth-century books, and home-made videos are all shelved together, millions upon millions of documents available on any topic. If students are savvy enough to turn to the library’s website, they are likely to search an aggregated database that includes more articles from more journals than any undergraduate library previously subscribed to.
Keywords
IQAC, SAU
Citation
Lunsford and Lunsford, 2008 Andrea A. Lunsford, Karen J. Lunsford “Mistakes are a Part of Life”: A National Comparative Study College Composition and Communication, 59 (4) (2008), pp. 781-806