LEARNING HOW TO SEE: British Council Film Collection

Wednesday, 9 May 2012

British Council Film Collection - now online

The British Council Film Collection is an archive of over 120 short documentary films made by the British Council during the 1940s designed to show the world how Britain lived, worked and played.

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Quotations

Critical Thinking is a desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and hatred for every kind of imposture. Francis Bacon, (1605)

Information Literacy is knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner. CILIP (2003)

Information literacy--a slippery term; means lots of things to lots of people. It has no urgency and because it borrows words from other meanings, it actually doesn't make sense. Cited in: Snavely, L., & Cooper, N. (1997). The information literacy debate. Journal Of Academic Librarianship, 23(1), 9.

The problem with such definitions and models is that they continue to view literacy as a state which can be achieved rather than an ongoing process and group of practices.

Belshaw, D. (2011). Never ending thesis.

A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them...The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others. William Hazlitt (1822). 'On the ignorance of the learned'.

Wikipedia – the encyclopedia where you can be an authority, even if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. ‘‘Wikilobbying’’ performed by Stephen Colbert (2007) Available online.

We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. At the same time, Americans have unprecedented access to the diverse and independent sources of information, as well as institutions such as libraries and universities, that can help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise. Barack Obama's proclamation on information literacy (2009)

You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire. Meno by Plato (written 380 BC). Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos. Gaddis, William, JR, London: Jonathan Cape, 1976: 20

The present classification like all preceding or following ones will always be illusory. Annemarie Sauzeau, writing on the project 'Classifying the thousand longest rivers in the world' completed with her husband Alighiero Boetti. (quoted by Tate (2012) in the exhibition 'Game Plan.'

It is a peculiarity of academic learning that its focus is not the real world itself but others’ views of that world. Diana Laurillard, Rethinking university education. Routledge, 1993: 50). Quoted in Paul Levin, Write great essays!, 2nd ed. Open University Press, 2009: xi

Although he is not a particularly proactive information seeker in most situations, The Dude’s invitational attitude allows him to keep his mind open to ‘‘new shit’’ DILL, E. and JANKE, K. (2011), “New Shit Has Come to Light”: Information Seeking Behavior in The Big Lebowski. The Journal of Popular Culture.

And thus we can state The First Characteristic of Bad Books: the bibliography has strange features. Daniel F. Melia (2012). Pseuds' corner. THES, 9th Feb 2012.

At worst, a reading list becomes a measure of academic virility ("mine is bigger and longer than yours!"). Bevan, N. (2012). Preliminary to reading. THES, 23rd Feb. 2012.

I love archives. You go to an archive to answer a question, check a fact, and come away with an idea, a lyrical note, another query, more uncertainty. Edmund De Waal (2012). Exhibition pamphlet for 'Edmund de Waal at Waddesdon, 20 April - 28th October 2012' at Waddesdon Manor.

"On average those who gained a first-class honours degree borrowed twice as many items and logged into MetaLib (to access e-resources) over three times as much as those who achieved a third-class degree."
—
Dave Pattern, University of Huddersfield, interviewed in Library and Information Gazette, 2nd September 2010

And in line with its claim to totality Nazism brings new technology and new organisations into everything. Hence the immense number of abbreviations
-
Klemperer, V. (1957). Languages of the Third Reich. Continuum

There was a time when the word “research” meant “critical and exhaustive research or experimentation having as its aim the discovery of new facts or interpretations" (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1976). Research today often means little more than locating random snippets using a search engine.
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Gorman, M. (2012). The prince’s dream: a future for academic libraries, The New Review of Academic Librarianship, 18(2), 114.

It is easy to produce dreadful assignments by using a search engine to do a quick, undiscriminating trawl. Searching for a few words from your assignment task, copying from websites you come across and then pasting together disconnected bits and pieces to present as your assignment will get you a very low grade.
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Northedge, A. and Chambers, E. (2008). The arts good study guide, 2nd ed. (p. 271)

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
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From The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein, quoted in Collins, H. (2010). Creative research. AVA. (p. 11)

One can teach what one doesn't know if the student is emancipated - the explicative system has to be overturned
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Ranciere, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford University Press, p.15

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Wednesday, 9 May 2012

British Council Film Collection - now online

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