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Keith Cronin wonders: <<Many of these students' inquiries could be easily
answered by perusing the archives... I assume many of us point this out to
those who post such queries. It's not a blow-off; it makes good sense, and
forces the student to do some actual research.>>
It's not just students who do this. <g> But yes, it's a good idea to force
students to do some of the legwork before asking questions. I have all kinds
of quaint notions, including the belief that school is about learning to
think, not just memorizing facts an asking teachers to provide easy answers.
<<But to what extent can/should they use such archival information? Can they
quote us?>>
If you state something in public, you can be quoted. And, of course,
misquoted:
<<Is it therefore acceptable for a student to write something like, "One
writer, a Keith Cronin from Layoff City, Florida, remarked that 'Information
Mapping is utterly fabulous,'" even though I did not say this to the actual
student doing the research?>>
If that quote contains the gist of what you actually said, they can
certainly write such sentences: they need to remove the quotes if those
aren't your actual words and they're paraphrasing, but need to retain the
quotes if those are your literal words. And, of course, they need to provide
an attribution (your name and the forum in which you spoke). It would be
polite to confirm the quote with you--as many people have done when quoting
me--but there's no legal requirement for them to do so.
If they've misquoted you (e.g., you said "is not" instead of "is"), them's
the breaks. You could legally insist that they publish a retraction, and
perhaps even sue them for damages if they grossly misrepresented your
opinion, but the risk of speaking publically is that someone will misquote
you or quote you out of context. Politicians have nightmares about this.
<<are opinions stated in an Internet bulletin board "quotable" as academic
research?>>
"Opinions" count as anecdotal evidence from a specific group of
communicators rather than all communicators as a whole, but if you collect
enough such anecdotal evidence, you begin to establish a credible body of
data on which to base hypotheses. You'll still have to test those hypotheses
if you're making any claim of scientific rigor in your results, or if you
plan to make potentially costly decisions based on anecdotal evidence, but
it's a start towards understanding a problem.
Incidentally, this dichotomy between observation and testing parallels the
progress of science from the traditional to the modern. For example, the
"naturalists" used to go out and observe nature and report on and speculate
about what they observed. In contrast, the more ecologist replaces this
speculation with the act of creating hypotheses and testing them. Both are
necessary aspects of science, which is something that many modern
researchers have forgotten.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an
accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a
house"--Jules Henri Poincaré
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