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

[Tery G]

Ah, I see. Yes, they can certainly find something that's somehow related to
almost anything. What they can't find is the exact topic itself, or what's
happening currently with that topic. And honestly, I don't want them
creating presentations on "the history of ________" because that hasn't
worked in the past. The students who have done it have not engaged with the
material and have created presentations that were uninspired, to say the
least. I've discovered that the students who head in that direction are
looking for the easy way out, but I want to see them *thinking* about their
topic, asking questions of it and trying to find answers to those questions.


Tery








On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Eric P. S. Baumer <epb47 at cornell.edu>wrote:

> even with such nascent topics as sexting, cyberbullying, Second Life, or
> Perez Hilton, I suspect there are relevant articles in at least some
> academic journal. for example, Google Scholar seems to indicate that their
> are articles on "bullying" at least back to the 1970s and 1980s. presumably,
> someone writing a paper about cyberbullying would want/need to cite sources
> about its non-cyber counterpart.
>
> I'm not saying that the citation of popular media is unnecessary or
> inappropriate, and I'm certainly not suggested that articles about the exact
> topic of interest will necessarily be published. however, I'm skeptical of
> the assertion that *no* relevant papers exist simply because the topic is so
> novel. "There is nothing new under the sun," and emergent online behaviors
> are almost certainly related to previously existing offline behaviors.
>
> ~Eric
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re:[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 75, Issue 22
> From: Brabham, Daren C <dbrabham at email.unc.edu>
> To: Tery G <teryg93 at gmail.com>, Margaret Borschke <
> Margaret.Borschke at unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Thu Oct 21 09:22:58 2010
>
>> In addition to concepts and trends such as cyberbullying, sexting, and so
>> on, there's also the technologies themselves. Twitter was a breakthrough
>> technology in many ways, but it took a while for peer-reviewed stuff to get
>> published about it (and by now it has evolved so much that the first
>> peer-reviewed articles seem dated). Same goes for Second Life (which, while
>> I know it's still a vibrant place, pretty much seems to have come and gone
>> in a hurry in terms of popular interest). And technologies that launched and
>> were abandoned quickly (e.g., Google Wave) may never get peer-reviewed
>> coverage.
>>
>> It's also instructive to use articles from the popular press when these
>> tech trends happen. There's always the initial hype (and simultaneous
>> warnings that the technology will ruin society) in the popular press, but
>> eventually it evens out and scholarly work about the topic starts to have
>> some meaning. I'm all for students looking at a variety of sources, so long
>> as they're critically using them and have an appropriate amount of modesty
>> in their claims.
>>
>> One of the best student papers I've ever read critically engaged the
>> writing of Perez Hilton and other gossip blogs and how those sources were
>> important for mainstream media. When's the last time you cited Perez in your
>> work?
>>
>> db
>>
>> ---
>> Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D.
>> Assistant Professor
>> School of Journalism & Mass Communication
>> University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
>> Carroll Hall, CB 3365
>> Chapel Hill, NC 27599
>> (919) 962-0676 (office)
>> (801) 633-4796 (cell)
>> daren.brabham at unc.edu
>> www.darenbrabham.com
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>
>