Dental Floss, the Truth and the Efficacy of Research

The saying when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail is true. As a new student of research, I'm seeing the connections to, and the importance of, research everywhere. People without even a passing interest or awareness of research however, could not escape the story trending lately about the effectiveness of dental floss. I was amazed at how innocuous a story as dental hygiene was the lead item for a brief period on television news while simultaneously blowing up on Twitter. I think this story speaks to something a little more profound than gum disease; it speaks to what we think is common knowledge, or more specifically scientifically correct, suddenly being challenged. It's also interesting that a lot of the stories in the media focused on the validity of the research that supported flossing as a part of good dental hygiene. Some of the research was sponsored by the industry that makes billions of dollars a year selling dental floss, hardly an impartial sponsor. After the body of research was reviewed, the number of participants, and the length of how long the subjects were studied was also questionable. Perhaps it would serve the general public more if people understood what a peer review is, how a body of research develops and changes over time, and most importantly, how critical it is to at least try and eliminate bias in a research study. It is kind of tricky though, to encapsulate all that minutia about research, in a 140 character tweet.

Let Academic Documents Live!

I remember meeting a friend many years ago at the McMaster University library where she was a student. While waiting for her to finish up, I browsed the stacks and came upon graduate student theses. One tome stood out: "The Role of Dionysus in Greek Mythology". It was several hundred pages thick. I wondered at the time and energy that must have been spent researching and writing this document. That was my first real exposure to academic work, and it was intimidating to say the least. I'm sure that thesis is still in the stacks at the Mac library, but in light of this week's readings, it has got me thinking - where does academic knowledge live? In scholarly journals? In the stacks of a library? As nebulous data until someone connects to it through a link or a Google search? The most surprising read was Citations are not enough: Academic promotion panels must take into account a scholar’s presence in popular media (Biswas & Kirchher, n.d.). The statistics of how little peer reviewed academic papers are cited, let alone read is disheartening. In another reading, Blogging in the Academy (Nackerud & Scaletta, 2008), the authors describe how faculty and students at the University of Minnesota were using a then newly implemented blogging platform. I copied and pasted one of the links referenced in the article. The whole platform has been shut down. I'm guessing the university felt students and faculty could make use of other readily available commercial blogging platforms instead. And the blogs contained therein? Gone with the wind unless individual bloggers took the time to transfer their blogs somewhere else. In both of these cases, the formal academic documents and personal blog posts are not really living. In the digital age, if academic work is to live, it has to be part of a inter-connected web of similar information or what George Siemens referred to when he spoke of forming connections. The article (Wecker, n.d.) on Academia.edu left me more cautiously optimistic. Despite some push-back by some academic institutions, Academia.edu and the whole open access publishing inititatives seem to be a way for academic work to live in the digital age.

The Seductive Detail

I never knew how much I loved terminology until I started this course. While researching my longer critique for Assignment 4, I came upon the term The Seductive Detail. It is interesting that I discovered this idea while investigating cognitive load theory in the context of online learning, because it was actually John Dewey in the early 20th century who came up with the term. Dewey was referring to text passages or illustrations, that while increasing reader interest, were not central to the main content. Could Mr. Dewey have even imagined the YouTube, MOOCs and Khan Academy world we live in today? And yet the seductive detail is quite relevant today for educational researchers to examine. Is a video, an interactive game, or even the narration in an online learning module supporting the learning process, or possibly distracting from it? My investigation into cognitive load theory and the seductive detail has so much relevance to my elearning development practise. Now that I am beginning to understand the ramifications of how content is organized on human cognition, I will be using multimedia that more judiciously. In a world of online distractions, I don't want my learning content to be just that much more visual (or audio) noise.