1. We do not ask Google for medical advice. Ever. EVER. I have an imaginary rolled-up newspaper here, Senator Johnson. Do not make me use it.

2. Either the Senator, his wife, or both need some introductory information literacy instruction if he/she/they think that’s how you construct a Google query. I know a guy, Senator. Blow up my cell if you want some help. It doesn’t have to be like this.

3. Planned Parenthood, the best source of free health care and contraceptives in most places in the United States, charges on a sliding scale. Because, unlike the Senator and quite possibly his wife, I know how to use Google, I looked around online. Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin does not disclose how broke you have to be to get free birth control. My best guess is omg so very broke. 

4. “You can get it. Go online, type it in. It’s easy to get.” So, what - I type your idiotic query into Google and a sheet of minipills slides out of my DVD-ROM? Stirrups emerge from under my desk? Please see #1 and do not forget my imaginary rolled-up newspaper.

5. Though it pained me to do it, I tried typing “What if I can’t afford birth control?” (Jesus help us, question mark and all) into Google. Here, in order, is what I got on the first page of results -

• A news story about Senator Johnson’s multi-layered idiocy.
• The ThinkProgress link at the top of this post.
• A DailyKos article about the same.
• Someone at The New Republic trying to explain to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk how hormonal birth control actually works.
• Some other person on Tumblr responding to Senator Johnson’s multi-layered idiocy with the following .gif from Mad Men (preach, Peggy. Preach.) -
  

• An article called “Getting on Birth Control Pills without Getting off Your Budget” on a website called Estronaut. According to their “about” page, the information was left to wither and die, alone and unloved, in 1999. If this is the site that the Senator or his wife was referring to, things are much, much worse than I thought. My freshmen wouldn’t even attempt to use this swill.
• STFU, Conservatives weighing in on Senator Johnson’s multi-layered idiocy.
• A tweet from Will Ferrell from March 7th - “If you can’t afford condoms just wear your Crocs. Best birth control ever…” I kind of hope this is the site the Senator or his wife found. The advice is actually better than what’s on :: shudder :: Estronaut. It’s at least more current.
• A creeper inviting Sandra Fluke to put her mouth to uses he deems more worthwhile than testifying before Congress.
• Something called iVillage where people think that people who can’t afford birth control shouldn’t be allowed to fuck.

So perhaps the helpful, medically necessary advice that the Senator’s wife was able to find on Google has been shoved off the first page of results by coverage of her husband’s stupidity? If so, gosh, way to ruin it for everyone, Senator Johnson. Can we have our birth control now?

I am in the library’s cafe, listening to the students at the table next to me talk about how they don’t have to bother getting good sources for their composition papers, as the instructor doesn’t notice/care. To wit -

“I just ran some Google search and took the first three things.”

“I read the back of the book and whatever, but of course I didn’t read it.”

“The library homepage doesn’t make any sense, so I didn’t bother.”

Writing instructors, you needto hold students to account for the quality of their sources and how they use them. They notice when you don’t and it teaches them bad habits that will follow them through their working lives. If you don’t have time/don’t know how to do this yourself*, please come find someone like me who knows how to teach and assess research skills.

* - Because your composition instructor also neglected this part of your education and the bad habits it taught you are impacting your work to this day. See how that works?

davebloom:

suitwithsneakers:

I made a song about Jane Austen, over the beat to “Moves Like Jagger.” 

No, really…

My wife and I are both implicated here (for the record, her voice isn’t naturally that high, but has, in fact, been to clubs—just not often*).  Hope Eugene keeps this series of retooled pop hits coming. 

* Dance clubs, that is.  We’ve spent plenty of time at shows.

I like having a recent example of remix/reuse to use on the first day of class (today, in fact). Looks like the undergrads are going to find out what a weirdo I am on day one, instead of having it dawn on them slowly.

Thanks for making me a part of this, rapper man.

mimisaurus:

girlwithalessonplan:

Bibliographic citation has apparently eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of persnickety professors.

What a colossal waste. Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.

—Kurt Schick

I will never think teaching MLA citation is a waste of time.  I don’t make it 50% of the paper by any means, but it’s an important task to get them to think critically about the text they are looking at.  Some kids have no idea what type of source they are looking at; they just assume “it’s a website.”

But is a newspaper or magazine article?  A blog post?  An online encyclopedia?  Teaching MLA citation is a step in getting them to look at the parts that make a source; then they can decide if it’s credible.

All my love for MLA.

One of the key concepts I teach in my class is citation - when to cite, how to cite, why to cite. I spend weeks teaching students how to cite different types of sources while they learn how to locate relevant information in said sources. As is noted above, if you learn how to cite, you learn how to think about the different parts of a source, to contemplate the name of the author, the date of publication, etc. It requires you to note things that undergraduates are otherwise inclined to ignore. Moreover, citation is a gesture of respect and a tangible link in the chain of research. I tell my students that citing things shows where they live, what they know, and that they, in fact, have done the legwork to earn the right to speak on a given topic.

Unfortunately, citation is not the “preoccupation of persnickety professors” (nice alliteration, though). Most professors pay only cursory attention to the issue, allowing students to commit academic misconduct and perform lazy, indifferent research. The reasons for this are varied, but the two most prominent, I think, are that professors simply lack time to focus on such things and that professors themselves often do not know how to cite correctly or conduct proper research.

(Source: visualturn)

I am running a Google search for “pumpkin scones,” because, duh, it’s Sunday and raining and I have a can of pumpkin puree and breakfast for dinner.

This popped up.

Huh.

The only other time I’ve seen a similar notice is when running a search for the word “jew” on Google Germany (Google.de) to prove a point to my students. Go ahead and try it if you haven’t before.

Couple things -

• My understanding of copyright law is shaky at best, but I know that recipes exist in an unusual space, legally speaking. So… really? They can do this?
• Consider this your less-than-gentle reminder that it’s not just the algorithm. There is a man behind the curtain and he definitely has control over what goes on when you run a search. Technology = human and subject to our various whims and systems.

eta - Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of is that the offending site scanned a page from a cookbook and posted a PDF or something. But the linked DMCA complaint doesn’t exist (which is also unhelpful), so I can’t say for sure..

infoneer-pulse:

Digital Life - Steal this report: college plagiarism up, says Pew report

You may know of it among your college friends, or if you’re a parent, among your kids’ friends: plagiarism is becoming as common as Wi-Fi connections at coffee shops.

The Pew Research Center, in conjunction with the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently surveyed 1,055 college presidents from two- to four-year schools, private and public. More than half of those top officials said they’ve seen an increase in plagiarism in the past 10 years. Nearly all of them say computers and the Internet have played a major role in the rise in stealing others work and claiming it as their own

» via Today

Skeptical librarian is skeptical.

I think it’s easier to catch students plagiarizing now. I think it’s easier for students to copy and paste blocks of text from websites, articles, and electronic books into their own work. But I think it’s easiest of all to blame the internet for this problem, rather than taking a long, hard look at why the students don’t know any better or think they can get away with it in the first place.

The students in my information literacy course do not plagiarize more than once. When I catch them doing it, I confront them directly and explain the implications of their actions. We talk about academic misconduct, respect for the work of others, and remix culture. We talk about it being perfectly okay that they cannot yet write like the person with the PhD who wrote the scholarly article they found on their topic. We talk about the fact that college is hard and research takes time, so they never make the mistake of trying to write a paper the day before it’s due, a choice that often leads to plagiarism.

A university where the culture and coursework do not support these kinds of conversations is asking for students to commit plagiarism. It’s not the fault of the students and it’s certainly not the fault of the technology.

“How to be a Ho on the Internet: Information Literacies for Elected Officials.”

I’ll make a million dollars.

Please note: we have 2 1/2 graduate degrees between us. Yup.