Here are some things that students should learn while at university:

• what a “seminal” article is
• what a review article is
• what peer-review involves
• how to find scholarly work on a particular subject (hint: use the library)
• how to check the truth of a factual claim
• how to cite other writers
• what a paragraph is (and how to write one)

If you are a university student and you don’t know some of these things, I encourage you to start learning them. If you are a university teacher and suspect that many of your students don’t understand these things, I encourage you to devote your next class to introducing them to them.

There is, literally, no level of university education where complete ignorance about these things is acceptable or understandable.  (Obviously, if you are a university teacher and don’t know these things, then it’s time you did.) There will of course be degrees of mastery and understanding. I’m saying that students should be developing these competences from day one. And their incompetence on any given day should therefore be graded accordingly.

It has long seemed to me that the social sciences are much too concerned with the innovation of theories and methods, as if our ignorance stems from deficiencies at that level. I’m not sure that’s really where the problem lies. I think our methods and theories are, by and large, fine. What is needed much greater care in their application to the problem of knowing. Indeed, I think instead of developing new methods and theories I we need to strengthen our ability to use the old ones. I think we have forgotten the importance of training in fostering competence.

For quite some time, universities have been increasingly charged with preparing young people for the labor market. Students (and society in general) have demanded that they be given “competences” that are “relevant” to the problems posed by “global competition” or some other ominous force. More recently, however, concerns have begun to be voiced, by both educators and employers, that this drive for competence has neglected a set of underlying competences that were, perhaps, too readily dismissed as “academic”. We can call these “scholarly” competences.

They are important in what has been called “the knowledge society”. Indeed, scholarly competence constitutes what it means to be knowledgeable. Knowledge-able, i.e., “able to know”. It is, of course, grounded in the theories and methods that students learn at university. But it also has an important “craft” dimension, which is the focus of this blog. Most concretely, the ability to know things is supported by the student’s facility with texts, with reading and writing. And that is why the CBS Library has a resident writing consultant. We want to integrate writing skills and library skills into a unified ability to understand the changing world in which we live.

We are confident that this will also be useful to students on the job market, and society in the long run.

I’m going to start posting here again soon. It may take a little while to find a regular rhythm and clear focus. But we have to start somewhere.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

These two famous questions were asked by T.S. Eliot in 1934. That’s in the very, very early days of television and 55 years before the invention of the World Wide Web. I remember reading somewhere that Eliot used to say he didn’t read the newspapers because they were “too exciting”.  These days it’s becoming increasingly fashionable to take a break from the excitement of social media. Where’s the information, we me might ask, that we’ve lost in the outrage?

Libraries are often associated with the notion of “information literacy” and I’ve written about my doubts about this “metaphorical” use on the notion of literacy before. I think something is being lost in the idea that sifting through the vast amount of information that is available “at our fingertips” is on par with reading and writing, i.e., literacy proper. To apply the metaphor, when we teach (and preach) “information literacy”, I worry that we’re now teaching students something akin to using the Dewey decimal system to locate a book in a library but not teaching them how to read the language it’s written in.

I got a sense of the problem recently when I was part of a team teaching writing and library skills to a group students who were beginning their master’s dissertation writing. I noticed that they got a bit restless when we started teaching them how to use the library’s databases to survey the literature and locate sources. There wasn’t anything wrong with the advice we were giving them; it just didn’t seem to satisfy their curiosity.

It got me thinking that maybe the students reach a point, not of information overload, but information fatigue. The wisdom of knowing what you don’t know is replaced by the knowledge that comes from being informed about how much information there is (i.e., too much). In the end, the students’ awareness of how well-informed they are (i.e,. how much access to information they have) becomes a hindrance to the formation of proper beliefs about the practices they are studying. Indeed, it undermines their ability to form justified, true beliefs, i.e., to know things.

So I want to consider an alternative approach. Perhaps at a certain level of education (a master’s program and certainly a doctoral program) we should begin with what the students believe and teach them how to use their access to inform those beliefs. This will often, of course, mean challenging what they think is true.

The idea would be to get them out of the sort of naive open-mindedness that seems to guide their early engagement with the Internet. Recognizing that they don’t know something and that someone “out there” probably does, they go looking for someone to replace ignorance with knowledge. “Information literacy” here becomes the competence of recognizing a trustworthy source. But as they advance, they need us to help them replace false beliefs with knowledge, and to better support true beliefs on their scientific basis. This last is important in any effort to refine what is known, to study it further.

In this mode, students would go the databases with much more specific questions. The question is no longer “What has been written on this subject?” but “Is this claim true, and if so, how do we know?” This sort of inquiry will invariably lead them to research that is critical of what they thought they knew, and to competent practitioners of the methods that are normally used to test the relevant claims.

Instead of sifting through thousands of pages of “information” about a subject, students might now engage with dozens of scholars who are knowledgeable about particular claims about the world. What we have here, indeed, is a version of the distinction between being merely “literate” and being actually knowledgeable. In the end, we’re trying to give students the ability to know things, not just to find sources. We want to help them locate, not just the information, but the conversation.