I love horses. In fact, I have a wonderful little Standardbred I rescued from a dire fate. But this post is not about horses. It is about higher education, and the perception of students relative to writing and their experiences in the hallowed halls of academe.
A little prelude first. I am one of those professors within those hallowed halls. But I work hard to keep my feet balanced in two worlds: academe, and business — specifically related to its writing and communication needs. It is my conclusion that we in higher ed do a lousy job of preparing students with the knowledge and skills they will need to successfully negotiate in this new world of digital communication. Read on for one student’s commentary. There will be more interesting student-authored entries to follow:
Student Commentary
While I do agree with Ellen’s (fictional name) response, we must teach students to explore all avenues of research, I feel as though most things that can be found in a book can be found online these days. So many books have outdated material in them, but they are still sitting on the shelves. I think the best way in which higher education can prepare its students is to teach them how to use the tools properly.
For example, because the woman from the library came in and talked to us about how to analyze a website, we now have the skills to determine the credibility. I don’t think it is as important to teach where the materials can be found, but rather how to sort through those materials.
As mentioned above, many professors do require page lengths for papers, and I have even had several that only allowed one Internet source. For the times we are in now, these requirements are ridiculous. In the business world, no matter what type of office or business it may be, no one wants to read through a long paper, when the point could have been made in the first paragraph.
Instead of teaching students to write more, higher education should be teaching them to write less, but in a more complete way. There is more learning and challenge involved in writing a shorter paper than a longer one because anyone can add useless information and unnecessary words.
Higher education needs professors to spend more time teaching the students how to write for real life situations than to meet the 20 page requirement.