Nicola Avery · @NicolaAvery
19th Nov 2010 from Twitlonger
with apologies to some of my colleagues / connections and a bit late for #PLENK2010, but two things about academic practice that continue to annoy me:
1. Published academic papers as pdfs with two columns. The world has moved on with 15+ years of web use, it is irritating to have to scroll down one column and sometimes a paragraph on the next page, then back up and down another column. Being able to read in this way is not a sign of academic competence, its idiotic when the majority of information on the web and design practices have advanced in data visualization and our eyes scan in increasingly different ways.
Oh and another thing - this is why many people continue to print out pdfs and damaging the environment - geddit - print - format - print ....
2. Writing sentences such as ......(Brown,1954) and (Hempelwith, 2008), if I am new to studying a particular area - this means nothing to me in the middle of sentence and is a complete distraction in an age where information distraction is challenging enough. In the print age this was ok, but I am new to the subject, I don't know who Brown and Hempelwith are - I might possibly go to the end of the article and read the citation but the chances are that it is not hyperlinked - I may completely forget that they ever existed and what they thought or did, in two paragraphs time - until the end. It is not a sensible approach to studying, without context (which is not always explained in the paragraph or two about the studies by Brown and Hempelwith in the paper...)
And are Brown and Hempelwith or the publishers of them really going to analyse for every use of their work in an age where it is getting increasingly difficult to claim any kind of originality for anything. Not to mention there could have been 500 Hempelwiths publishing in 2008 too. Does this really make better students and better explanation of thought with appropriate citation - really?
I can understand why students are paying others to write their papers.
This fell out of a discussion last night on the train...