[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 75, Issue 22

[Tery G]

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 at 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 at gmail.com>
> To: Air-L at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] acceptable sources for undergraduate research in new
>        media   fields
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTinFiLJYCF8oL4jOCoRjSd-N9xASdF-Hz89=VC4z at 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
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