Today I dazzled and amazed a class of 400-level French students with dictionaries. Yes, you read that right - dictionaries. Not fancy online databases with tons of bells and whistles, not archival products that contain crazy amounts of information, not even online dictionaries. No nothing of the sort. Just your run-of-the-mill dictionaries.
They might have been in French and some were bilingual, but really there wasn't anything special about them. Even so, the students were amazed to learn that such things exist (and in a library of all the crazy places). I suppose if I had grown up with Google and Wikipedia as our students have, maybe I wouldn't have guessed to look in the library for them either. Having grown up before everything was done online, I would think that the library would be a natural place to look for something as basic as a dictionary. Apparently this is not true anymore.
I know that most things go in cycles, so perhaps the old "technologies" behind printed materials will one day become new again for this and future generations. Today's students weren't even freshman. They were juniors and seniors who were just now realizing that they could get these basic resources in the library. Not just dictionaries but grammars, thesauri, verb charts, etc. How different would their experience as a French major been if they had realized that or someone had told them 3 or 4 years ago?
On a related note: you should check this film out:
3 comments:
How funny. :)
It's easy to forget about non-electronic sources. I hate it when stuff i need isn't available online :)
Wow. I feel kinda old and obsolete now...I remember reading the dictionary for fun as a very young kid. It is really sad that these kids were completely unfamiliar with its wonders! :) But I guess I do the same thing when it comes to the law - the bosses are always asking me if I know where the books are for the municipal codes, the federal reporters, etc. - and I never know because I look up 97% of my legal research online.
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