Post by Dark Cloud on Jul 29, 2010 15:47:10 GMT -6
I thought this appropriate to all the supposed 'research' that goes on here and elevation of terminology. It's an appraisal of our college and university systems. Here's a short bit:
The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there's a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.
And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this? But it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done. [/b]
Bold print by my selection.
I agree, and the ridiculous product on the History Channel - which should be acknowledged for the benthic level production it has become - reflects the same problems at the higher ends. But, in the depths, they're more ridiculous.
www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/whats-wrong-with-the-american-university-system/60458/
In Custerland we have authors appealing to the least educated, and both author and reader often confuse trivial precision and irrelevant minutiae with meaningful history. If you're not interested in, or know anything about, the late 19th century in general, you are unable to understand or remotely relate to those things that were important to, especially, the officer corps of Custer's 7th. If all you know is the process and the distinctions of military buttons, you'll find yourself insisting these things are important beyond any reason. That's what leads to obscenities like re-enactors claiming to be living historians, when they aren't historians at all and recent photos cast doubt on their cellular viability status.
And, it leads to jokes like Hero's Rest presentations, that are the digital equivalent of crayon drawings amidst juvenile nonsense.
The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there's a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.
And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this? But it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done. [/b]
Bold print by my selection.
I agree, and the ridiculous product on the History Channel - which should be acknowledged for the benthic level production it has become - reflects the same problems at the higher ends. But, in the depths, they're more ridiculous.
www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/whats-wrong-with-the-american-university-system/60458/
In Custerland we have authors appealing to the least educated, and both author and reader often confuse trivial precision and irrelevant minutiae with meaningful history. If you're not interested in, or know anything about, the late 19th century in general, you are unable to understand or remotely relate to those things that were important to, especially, the officer corps of Custer's 7th. If all you know is the process and the distinctions of military buttons, you'll find yourself insisting these things are important beyond any reason. That's what leads to obscenities like re-enactors claiming to be living historians, when they aren't historians at all and recent photos cast doubt on their cellular viability status.
And, it leads to jokes like Hero's Rest presentations, that are the digital equivalent of crayon drawings amidst juvenile nonsense.
