Midpoint is a special class without any assignment attached. During Midpoint, we will look at current issues in the world of information and research. I hope it will be helpful in broadening your understanding.
Open access involves publishing information directly on the Web for all to read or view without charge. In most cases, however, the writer or publisher retains copyright, which means you can't revise the work or sell it to others. It is a way to help people avoid the amazingly high costs coming from academic publishers. This video explains it:
With Open Access academic information being only about 20% of all publications, people have turned to piracy, creating free download sites that violate copyright. The biggest of these is the shadowy site, Sci-Hub, which changes its Internet address frequently:
Since university students lose access to many academic databases after they graduate, they need legitimate open access resources. Here are some of them:
I have published a column that details other options for finding academic open access books and articles: 'Finding Open Access Can Be Harder than Finding Nemo." Computers in Libraries (Online Searcher section) 44, no. 1 (January, 2024): 41-42.
Predatory Publishers form a subset of what I call "inferior publishers." At this point, academic publishing operates on the basis of conventions that are supposed to guard quality. These involve exercises like peer review, recognition of journals by other scholars, inclusion of journals in academic databases, and so on. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) does a good job of screening out online free journals that don't meet the quality standards demanded by academia.
But there is no law that compels a journal from following the rules. Some journals skimp on peer review or don't do it at all. And some are predatory, meaning that their main purpose appears to be to get "article processing fees," often a thousand or more dollars, while doing little or no peer review and publishing within a month or two.
Prime Scholars is an example of a publisher putting out predatory journals. What is really unfortunate is that Google Scholar often includes such journals in its search results, so it's reader beware.
For more on this, see my article: "Predators in our Midst." Computers in Libraries (Online Searcher section) 43, no. 8 (October, 2023): 42-43.
Here is a real example of an email from a journal without proper quality that invited me to contribute an article. My comments in red:
Dear Colleague,
Thank you for cooperation and support. Your kind attention is requested for the following announcement.
Journal: Journal of Scientific Research and Reports (https://www.eurohost365.net/jsrr/journal)
Frequency: 15 days Publishes every 15 days!
Publication model: Online as well as Hard copy option
Discounted Publication Charge: 85 USD (4700 INR) (Up to the end of this month) What the author has to pay
Ongoing volume: vol 21
Transparent and High standard Peer review: This journal follows the modern transparent OPEN peer-review process. As per a recent paper published in a Springer Nature journal, we (SDI) received high rank among topmost Global Publishers to adopt modern transparent OPEN peer-review process (Details: https://link.
For more insight into the problems of predatory publishers see my article: "Predators in our Midst." Computers in Libraries (Online Searcher section) 43, no. 8 (October, 2023): 42-43.
We live in a world in which misinformation (ideas that are mistaken being shared) and disinformation (ideas known to be false and often spread for political or destructive motives) abound. This has, of course, led to chaos and controversy at an unprecedented scale. The second appendix in Research Strategies attempts to address the problem, but we should be aware that this is one of the greatest challenges facing the information world today.
See Arnold Schwarzenegger on the path of hate:
ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model by OpenAI that generates human-like text. Trained on a vast corpus of internet text, it produces responsive and contextually relevant outputs. The architecture is based on transformers, a deep neural network that excels at natural language processing. With over 175 billion parameters, ChatGPT is one of the largest language models available.
Potential applications of ChatGPT include conversational AI, content generation, and language translation, especially for chatbot implementation. The model has also demonstrated exceptional performance on language tasks such as summarization and question-answering, making it a valuable resource for advancing language-based systems.
In summary, ChatGPT is a highly advanced language model with exceptional capabilities for generating human-like text. Its large size and superior performance make it a valuable asset for those seeking to enhance language-based systems.
(I didn't write the information above. It was written by the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT ( I asked it to write 8 lines with two paragraphs explaining ChatGPT. Then I asked it to reduce the output to 150 words and write it at a college student level.) https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
This whole field is in flux. Google is following up with its own AI tool - Bard - and more will come. What does it mean for education and life when a bot can create intelligent text for us?
Note that if you ask ChatGPT to generate a bibliography for you on a topic, most or all of the citations will be to works that don't actually exist.
Here is our course's policy on use of generative AI:
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Artificial intelligence now allows us to have the machine do a lot of our writing for us. That may well be useful in some settings, but when you are a student, a large part of your research and writing experience requires you to develop skills. Those skills grow when you wrestle through your own research design, do your own searches, develop your own outlines and wrestle through your own writing. The more you turn any of these skills over to AI, the less likely it is that you will develop them for yourself. That is why we encourage minimal use of AI when you are in a learning task such as research or writing. AI can be deceptive in its abilities. ChatGPT, for example, regularly invents citations to articles or books that don't exist. It also invents information if it does not have needed information at hand. Thus, if you are using AI in your work, you will need to check what it produces very carefully. AI can sometimes be helpful in generating first drafts. It is particularly useful for English as a second language students who prefer writing in their home language and translating into English. For this course, you are permitted to use a translation program. In any assignment you submit, you must report any use of an AI tool, explaining what you used and how you used it. Think of such AI as a co-author that must be reported. But keep AI use to a minimum while you are in the learning experience of research and writing. |
Writing a research essay is not a stream-of-consciousness effort like dashing off a poem or short story. It's more like taking Lego pieces and building the Starship Enterprise. Here is an example from an academic article project two of my fellow librarians are working on right now. It looks messy but it's carefully structured around a research question and outline that form the "instructions." Do you see how the pieces fit together by a definite plan with a number of pieces?
Planning Document.
The following document lays out the pieces that will go together into our masterpiece (or Lego structure).
Maximum 6000 words
a. The huge task of developing an information literate student. Our increasingly challenging information world – the growth of available knowledge, the diversity of information quality, the spread of misinformation/disinformation, the demands of employers for information literate graduates. Researcher B
b. Current state of the art – primarily one-shots with some embedded work and a few credit courses. Most infolit instruction currently is in the form of one-shots which offer limited development of student abilities. Researcher C – note studies by Julien and Polkinghorne that detail what is being done in US and Canada.
c. Overworked librarians failing to accomplish the task they wish to complete. Librarians express frustration over the limitations they experience – lack of time to teach all students, limitations in staffing, evidence that student research skill development is not what it should be. Researcher B
d. Faculty inattention/resistance to taking on information literacy instruction themselves. Show evidence that faculty value student information literacy but rarely take on the instruction tasks themselves. Researcher C
e. Calls from many authors for a teach the teacher model. Challenges: many attempts to enlist faculty have been sporadic and have tended to bury faculty in lots of details/suggestions without providing a clear and pedagogically helpful plan that faculty can embrace. Researcher B
(We can choose the order later)
Researcher B
Researcher C
Researcher A
[The following is taken directly from our proposal and lays out the plan for this portion]:
Workshop Goals
The challenge in our institution is not a lack of effort to achieve information literacy but rather a lack of sufficient librarians to attain anything like universal information literacy. We need a “teach the teacher” effort. The faculty workshop we offered in the Fall of 2022 worked on these premises:
Workshop Design
The initial all-faculty presentation summarized the content reflected in workshop goals (https://prezi.com/view/LNsqiNiHFBtCamfaORMD/). The following four weekly workshops were based on a LibGuide platform: (https://libguides.twu.ca/DevelopingStudentResearchers4Unit). The first of the follow-up workshops covered the common faculty-librarian experience—our students do poor research projects—and discussed the reason why this difficulty must be overcome. The second considered the importance of student disciplinary enculturation and offered some means to enhance it. The third covered research design issues, both for professors creating assignments and for students completing them. Professors were asked to envision an ideal student project and identify elements of a rubric. The fourth showed faculty how to develop faceted, formative assignments that would turn the summative research project into a tool for student training through active mentoring.
Land Acknowledgement
Trinity Western University's Langley campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. We are grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on this land.
