Create
Why do people do research?
Sometimes, people do research out of a simple desire for knowledge. They are
simply curious about a certain topic, and they want to know more about it. More
often, though, research is done with a purpose in mind. People want to learn
more about a topic for a reason. What that reason is can vary greatly, from
legislators considering new laws on unfamiliar issues to scientists conducting
research about a new technology to a student preparing a research paper for
class. Generally though, people do research so that they can use the knowledge
they gain to do or accomplish or make something, or in other words, to create.
Research done with the end goal of creating something is also the most
thorough, effective, and engaging kind of research to do, particularly if the
new material created is new, and also if the researcher intends for his
material to be read, seen, or used by a real audience, for a real purpose.
However, actually creating new
material or content has for a long time been quite difficult, time-consuming,
and even expensive to do, and getting into the hands of a real audience that
might appreciate it can be even more troublesome. This is especially true of
students writing research papers, as audiences outside of the classroom can be
very difficult to find. This has led to the general belief that unless you are
a skilled professional established in your field, you can’t actually create or
do anything “real.” Students don’t do “real” research papers; they just write
10-page essays on some topic that they looked up in some book in the library,
that will only ever be read by their teacher. Amateur filmmakers can’t make “real”
movies that real audiences will see; they only make short video clips that they
and their friends can enjoy. Amateur writers can’t make “real” books that lots
of people will read unless they’re lucky or good enough for a publisher to want
to take a chance on them.
Fortunately, thanks to the
technologies and methods of communication that have become available in today’s
digital world, this isn’t the case anymore. There are all kinds of ways for
quite a variety of content to easily be created and shared across the world
with minimal effort. We’ll discuss some of these technologies later on, but the
main point is that the average person can’t make “real” content. It’s not true
that students can’t do real research, or that amateurs can’t make movies or
write stories that many people will read.
However, technology has moved a bit
quicker than the mindset of the people. Many of us are still so unused to the
idea that we can make real content that we don’t grasp the importance or the
benefits of doing so. The following selection is a portion of a presentation given
by Taylor Williams, a student at Brigham Young University and one of the
authors of this ebook (particularly of this chapter), to a group of professors
and students on this topic. He addresses many of the reasons why creating new
and “real” content is important, mostly in the context of student research
papers:
“Why create? And what do we even mean by “create?” By
“create,” we mean coming up with new content, which can be in the form of text,
books, pictures, videos, or any number of different formats. Technically, many
students already do create new content all the time. Students pick topics, do
research, study and work hard for hours on end, and produce a hopefully decent
research paper or project to turn in to their professors. This isn’t bad,
because it gives students valuable experience in how to write research papers,
but there’s a better way to do it. As is, most of these papers are written for
the sole purpose of getting a good grade.
Also, the only people who will likely ever read these papers (aside from
the students who wrote them) are the students’ professors, and maybe their
TA’s. After the professor reads it, and
a grade is given, usually the paper is then either thrown away immediately, or
is shoved in a drawer somewhere for a year or two and then thrown away anyway.
Though understandable, doesn’t this seem a bit ironic? We teach students how to
do research and write papers on their research so that they can do it on their
own for real topics and real audiences later on in their lives and careers, but
while they’re in the process of learning how to do these things, most if not
all of their research papers wind up going nowhere except the trash can. Not
exactly motivating, and it’s not a realistic experience for the future, because
when students move on into their careers and have to do research and whatnot
there, they will be writing for very real audiences, and their research will
going much farther than the trash can (we hope, anyways). Also, since the end
goal of most students’ research papers or projects is to get a good grade and
nothing more, many students will fall into the habit of coming up with stuff
that’s only good enough to get the grade they want, rather than getting into
the habit of doing quality research, which is the point of teaching them how to
do research in the first place. So again, as is, most students technically
create already, but since they know that stuff they create is only going to be
read by one or two people, and because it’s written mostly just for the sake of
a grade, these students aren’t creating for real.
“We propose a different approach. Since the idea of teaching
students how to research and how to write papers or do projects is so that they
will be able to do these things on real topics for real audiences someday on
their own, why not have them do it on real topics for real audiences as they
are learning how to do it? This is what we mean by creating. Making real stuff
to be read or used by real people. We
want to have students be able to actually create. While this might not have
been realistically feasible in the past, it certainly is now, thanks to the
options that technology has opened up. We’ll talk more about the tools we can
use for this later on. Now again, why have students create? There are a number
of significant reasons. First, let’s
talk about the motivation factor. Let’s say that we give a student an
assignment to write a paper, and tell him that the only person who is going to
read it is his professor. Now let’s take that same student, and give him
another assignment to write another paper, but this time tell him that not only
will his professor read it, but it will be made available for all of his
classmates and maybe even other professors and students outside of his class to
read. Which of the two papers do you think that he will be more motivated to do
a better job on? Students will be more
motivated to put more higher-quality work into their papers and projects when
they are writing them for a real audience.
“Also, creating real content or material for a real audience
is also much more personally meaningful to the student. The satisfaction one
gets from successfully making something is always significant, and the
satisfaction and sense of personal achievement that comes from making something
real that real people will see and use is almost enough of a reward in and of
itself to merit doing so. Think of the young teenager who spends hours putting
together and editing a short video that he then posts on Youtube. Imagine his
satisfaction when he gets thousands of views on it (or even hundreds of
thousands of views, if it’s a good video). This same idea can also apply to
research papers and other school assignments. I have a friend who in her first
year at college was assigned a significant research project. However, her
forward-thinking professor decided to have his students write articles on their
topics for Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia, rather than a
traditional research paper. As you can imagine, knowing that what she wrote
would be available on the internet for anyone in the world to read made the
project a bit more intense for her than it would have been otherwise, but she
said afterwards that it was the most satisfying and meaningful assignment that
she had ever done, because she knew that she had actually made something “real,”
that real people might read and use.”
Through the many
digital tools available through the internet, it is remarkably easy for people
to find ways to create content and find audiences for it, thus making “real”
content and material. Most of the principles and tools behind finding audiences
for your content are the same as those described in the “Connect” section of
this chapter, such as utilizing social networking sites, finding websites or
blogs of people who write about your topic, etc., so we will simply refer the
reader to that section of the chapter for that. However, as for tools that one
can use to create their content and make it available to see, we will list a few
examples, though by no means should this be taken as a complete or
comprehensive list. We encourage the reader to be creative in how they create
their content.
●
As the friend that Taylor Williams mentioned in his
presentation did, one could use a Wikipedia article as an effective way of
making their research available to anyone who might have an interest in the subject.
Also, a Wikipedia article is an excellent platform to use, because other types
of content aside from text can easily be included or at least linked to it,
such as videos, ebooks, etc.
●
An ebook (such as this one) is an excellent format for books,
stories, research papers, and a host of other things. This could be a
particularly useful format in an academic setting, as student’s projects could
be done in ebooks, and also examples of works or assignments written by the
professor or even former classes could be easily kept and made available for
new students every year.
●
Blogs are becoming increasingly common, as they are very easy
to make publicly available, and are useful for inviting feedback on your
content, through comments.
●
Video is an incredibly versatile and useful format, as it can
easily be uploaded to the internet, and can also easily be included in other
content formats, such as ebooks, blogs, social networking sites, etc. Video can
be used to record many types of content, from interviews, animated
presentations or explanations, recordings of live presentations, music, or just
whatever a person wants to film.
Many
of the tools listed can easily be used in conjunction with one another, to
great effect.
It
is very easy for people to create new content with the tools that our modern
digital civilization has provided for us. It is nearly as easy now to create
new content as it is to learn about old content. Now we can learn in order to
create, not simply learn in order to learn.
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