The Wende Museum Workshop: A Reflection on Collaborative Research — by Elizabeth Hedge

At the beginning of my senior year graduation already loomed. Decisions about the future, careers, and next steps all felt too close for comfort. I always knew that I loved history but was not sure how to turn that into a career. I got an email from Professor Drummond at the beginning of the semester asking me to take part in the Wende Museum Workshop, in which students from Loyola Marymount University and from the University of Leipzig would collaborate to create an online exhibition from the Wende Museum’s archives. I jumped at the opportunity to participate. I have always loved museums and the work they do, and was eager to explore the field further. The project focused on bringing to life the rich history of East Germany under Communist rule, to give viewers the opportunity to understand everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, through an online exhibit featuring real life artifacts, photos, and eyewitness accounts.

I worked on the “public spaces” portion of the exhibit, which focused on the ideal socialist city and the state’s attempt to promote a “social consciousness.” The Communist state in East Germany aimed to create each city with socialist purpose – from the street names to art and architecture. This was more than mere urban planning: the city was built to inspire those within it to love and live by the socialist political culture. The city, and its public spaces, served to educate citizens. My partner Richard and I wanted to emphasize this unique feature of the GDR’s public spaces through our artifacts. However, working on public spaces meant that we had few physical artifacts to work with. Photos displaying public spaces proved to be our most reliable sources, and we focused on recognizable streets, buildings, and monuments. Our next steps were, first, to think about what exactly we wanted to convey within our public spaces exhibit, and, second, to decide how to properly convey the information in a digestible way for audiences.

Richard and I started by looking through the Wende Museum’s holdings for specific artifacts that highlighted the use of public spaces, in addition to working with our advisors to come up with our thesis: public spaces served to mobilize, politicize, and educate the people. With these three emphases in mind, we settled on four artifacts that would convey our thesis. The first was a mural in Halle-Neustadt by Josep Renau titled “The Unity of the Working Class and the Founding of the GDR,” which provided a visual representation of key ideological principles of the “New Germany.” The second was a picture of several street signs from the East Berlin, which carried the names of prominent communist thinkers and activists, including Freidrich Engels and Ernst Thalmann. These street signs helped keep the memory of these socialist heroes alive. The third artifact was a photo of the May Day Parade, the epitome of a constructed political event. May Day, May 1^st, also known as the International Workers’ Day of Action and Celebration for Peace and Socialism, was the most celebrated day in the year, and the public spaces within the city functioned to enhance the celebrations. Lastly, we chose a blueprint for Stalinallee, the most significant boulevard in East Berlin. Lined with magnificent office and apartment buildings designed with the socialist ideal in mind, the boulevard was meant to show the citizens of the GDR, and the rest of the world, that a Communist state was capable of achieving the ideal – according to their own – standard of city design.

Once we chose our artifacts we moved to in-depth research. We created small blurbs for each of the artifacts, quick and simple so that exhibition visitors could understand the purpose of the public spaces. We also gave readers the ability to explore all the artifacts in depth with links to further information and suggested reading. My research focused in particular on the perceptions of Stalinallee at home and abroad. East German city planners and architects celebrated the design of the street, claiming it to be the design of an ideal socialist city. However, I found a 1952 article in the American publication Life Magazine, which questioned this notion of a socialist utopia. The article debunked East German officials’ claims, pointing to a protest that broke out over poor working conditions and food shortages as well as emphasizing Stalinallee’s poor construction. The boulevard was still being built when Stalin died a year later, and officials quickly changed the name to Karl-Marx-Allee. The Life article was a key research item for me because it provided an outsider’s perspective, albeit an American, anti-communist one, that questioned the narrative East Germans presented about Stalinallee.

Richard and I worked well together as a team. Prior to arriving in Los Angeles, the German students had taken courses both in East German history and in museum studies. They were also able to devote all of their time to the workshop, while the other LMU students and I had to balance the workshop with our other classes and work. That meant that Richard and the German students were able to dive deep into the research about the artifacts and focus on the micro level. Richard brought lots of additional insight and knowledge that helped me greatly. But the LMU students and I were able to provide a macro perspective — to look at the exhibit as a whole and see it as a visitor would, to focus on the overall narrative rather than the details. This dual perspective was necessary for the successful completion of our exhibit. Richard and I also worked well together because we were open and able to share ideas with each other. We felt comfortable talking through what we wanted to do, sharing research materials, and offering suggestions, which ensured that our portion of the exhibit had a good sense of flow. Richard shared his knowledge with me so that I could focus on my pieces of the exhibit, but I was able to help him take a step back from all the information and see how all the pieces fit together.

The idea of taking on additional research projects while a student at university might sometimes feel more like a burden than an enriching educational experience. I loved working on the project because I developed a better understanding of archives, public displays of history, and museums, as well as broadened my knowledge about a subject I knew little about. Presenting at the Undergraduate Research Symposium felt intimidating, but it taught me important presentation skills. From my experience, what is most important for any student research project is to make sure that the subject matter is compelling to the students and driven by their interests so they are willing to devote the necessary time to it. Another important personal takeaway away from the project was that while I prefer to work independently, good partnerships can be of great benefit to both individuals. I could rely on Richard to help and teach me, and vice versa. Through our teamwork we ensured a successful completion of the project that probably would not have happened if we worked alone.

What I loved most about the project was learning about museum work. The “hands-on” work in the museum enabled me to learn about the process, the language, and the idea of “public history.” The information is important, but the way it is communicated sheds the most understanding. It makes history dynamic, creating new possibilities and perspectives. While I found the subject matter interesting, I particularly enjoyed the creation and organization of historical information in a museum. Reflecting on the project in this post has also helped me digest the project and what I took away from it. Beyond my genuine interest and passion for history, reflection and understanding the value of information continue to compel me to keep reading, writing, and learning about history.

Elizabeth Hedge graduated from Loyola Marymount University in May 2012 with degrees in History and Political Science, Magna Cum Laude . She wrote an Honors Political Science thesis on “Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage in America: The Courts Ability to Enact Social Change” and completed the Wende Museum Workshop in her senior year. New Zealand and British bred, Elizabeth was born in Hong Kong, and spent her childhood moving throughout Asia until beginning her studies at Loyola Marymount University in 2008.

CFP: Fifth Undergraduate Research Conference in German Studies

We would like to announce the Fifth Undergraduate Research Conference in German Studies on Saturday, April 18, 2015. This year the conference, co-organized by Lafayette College and Moravian College, will take place at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

This conference will give students the opportunity to present their research in all German-related fields, including but not limited to the study of German literature, film and culture, art history, music, philosophy, history and politics.

Format: we consider proposals for research papers and posters.

Papers and posters can be presented in either German or English.

Paper presentations may not exceed 15 minutes (2000 to 2500 words). Posters should include a thesis statement, short reference to literature and primary materials, a discussion of the methodology and results.

Please send your proposal of 250-300 words to Axel Hildebrandt at hildebrandta@moravian.edu by December 15, 2014.

The proposal should include:

• The title of the paper or poster
• Concise thesis statement
• Short list of primary and secondary sources (bibliography)
• Anticipated findings

The program committee will notify accepted applicants by January 25, 2015. For more information and updates, please contact Axel Hildebrandt at hildebrandta@moravian.edu.

Axel Hildebrandt, Associate Professor of German, Moravian College
Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, Professor of German, Lafayette College
Heikki Lempa, Associate Professor of History, Moravian College

Research, Reflection, and the Road to Grad School — by Rhiannon Koehler

In my second year of college I enrolled in a research seminar that at once thrilled and terrified me (everyone else was going to be so learned and so old, seniors at least!). The title of the seminar was “Germany in the Age of Total War.” I expected to walk out of the class with knowledge of books that I otherwise would not have been exposed to and perhaps having been a part of some interesting conversations. Instead, after participating in the course and doing research for the final paper, I ended up seriously considering history as a career-path.

The texts that we read in class propelled me to do good research in that seminar. I found that you simply cannot be steeped in monographs like Eric Weitz’s Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Claudia Koonz’s The Nazi Conscience, or William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single Germany Town, 1922-1945 without picking up a few things about how history ought to be done. Between the readings and our class discussions, which were expertly led to integrate historiography into our analysis of political, social, and cultural developments in Germany between 1914 and 1945, I found a research topic.

After reading Koonz and Allen, both of whom detail the change in German women’s lives brought about by Nazi ideology, I decided to write about women who deviated from the standard expectation of acting as wife and mother. But I wanted to do so without sticking to an examination of women in one profession. Rather, I wanted to look at the ways that women carved out space for themselves in a nation that left little room for women to diversify their professional status. I hoped to find out more about women who had joined the industrial sector, women who worked in close political proximity to Reich leadership, and women who had been deeply enmeshed with concentration camps.

I was not interested in looking at women who resisted, but rather at women who chose not to conform to ideological expectations even as they acted on behalf of or were complicit with the regime. I didn’t know who these women were at this point, but my professor pointed me in the direction of some comprehensive secondary sources that I might be able to glean for ideas of individuals to focus on. Texts such as Koonz’s Mothers in the Fatherland and Alison Owings’ German Women Recall the Third Reich were predictably helpful—but so too were Frank Buscher’s The US War Crimes Trial Program in Germany and David Crew’s Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945.

A close reading of these texts helped me choose the women I wanted to discuss and flesh out the framework for the paper. It became clear, though, that I would need voices from the era to support my arguments. It was at this stage that I actively began tracking down primary sources that would allow me to have an inside look at these women’s lives. I was lucky in that some of the women I chose to focus on, such as Traudl Junge, had left behind first-person narratives. I filled other gaps by examining primary sources such as the laws enacted in Nazi Germany that pertained to gender and records of public presentations about the cult of the domestic, such as those by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. The most helpful resource, though, was an online archive of sorts, maintained by the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, German History in Documents and Images, which allowed me to access legal documents, letters, and photographs from the era without having to travel to a physical archive.

This particular online collection of primary sources was incredibly well organized and abundant, and provided me with much-needed evidence for my paper. The paper that I wrote took longer to write than any paper I’ve written since (I am now a second-year graduate student at UCLA). It was the first time that I had ever engaged with an archive of any sort, the first time that I was writing a paper with a true thesis, and the first time that I was closely reading multiple monographs for my research. It helped that I had fantastic support. I had a professor who was always available and always gave constructive feedback. I had excellent resources, and I had the time to invest. It paid off—researching for the paper gave me skills that I would carry with me into the future, and the paper itself even won an award.

My paper, which I titled “Beyond Womanhood: Complicity and Action in Nazi Germany,” paved the way for much of my future research. It also did what the best undergraduate research should do: it gave me the confidence I needed to continue in the direction of graduate school, and it provided me with the skills that I would need for the rest of college. I have siblings, now heading into college, and my main piece of advice is: don’t hold off until you are a senior to take a research seminar. Do it as early as you feel ready, because the skills you will develop in those courses will help you be successful for the rest of your academic career.

Rhiannon Koehler graduated from Loyola Marymount University in May 2012, with Honors, with a major in History and a minor in Theatre Arts. Her seminar paper, “Beyond Womanhood: Complicity and Action in Nazi Germany,” won the 2012 History Department Award for Best Research Paper by a History Major. She is currently a Ph.D. student in American history at UCLA.

CFP: Berkeley Prize for Undergraduate Essays in German

BURG/es is pleased to announce the following opportunity for undergraduates:

The Berkeley Undergraduate Essay Prize is awarded annually by the Department of German for outstanding unpublished papers written during the previous calendar year by undergraduate students enrolled at a North American university/college. Thus the 2015 prize will consider papers written during 2014 on a broad range of topics in German studies. The winning essays carry a cash award of $500 each and will be considered for publication in the department’s electronic journal TRANSIT.

Essays for submission may be written in German or in English; one submission per student. They should be double-spaced, between 3000 and 5000 words in length (including notes and references), and without the student’s name on the paper, since the Awards Committee reads the essays anonymously. A separate cover sheet with the student’s name, major, year of study, title of the paper, address, phone number, e-address, and plans for graduate school (if applicable) should accompany the essay. The essay may be submitted in hard copy or electronically.

The paper has to have been written in the 16 months prior to the essay deadline.

The submission deadline is March 13, 2015; winners announced May 1. Send to:

Undergraduate Essay Prize
Attn: Nadia Samadi
German Department
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3243
e-address: germanic@berkeley.edu

On the Benefits of Attending College Next to An Archive — by Nolan Rivkin

As an undergraduate student studying modern German history at Loyola Marymount University, I had the unique experience of studying less than five miles away from the Wende Museum and Archive – easily the largest archive of East German cultural history in the Western United States (if not the entire U.S.) This proved to be an immensely useful resource. Over the course of four years of undergraduate study, I made use of the Wende during my sophomore, junior and senior years. During my sophomore year I participated in a binational (German and American) undergraduate research group and contributed to the Wende’s recently-launched online exhibition (see the previous entries from Elizabeth Drummond about the Wende Museum Project). As a junior I returned to the Wende to comb through their archives for my own research while writing a seminar paper; this seminar paper later formed the basis (and roughly the last third) of my senior-year thesis. While writing that thesis I made use of the Wende’s archives once again and also received hands-on experience of archive work from the “other side” as a research intern. It is safe to say that the proximity to this resource not only strengthened my own research but also guided my academic path, which has led to a doctoral program in history at the University of Tennessee.

If I had to narrow it down, I would say that my work with the Wende taught me two important lessons relevant to my studies in history:

1) How do make use of an archive. Archival research is one of the most basic tools of a historian, but undergraduate students of history rarely get the chance to do it. Admittedly, not every university is conveniently placed adjacent to an archive, but nevertheless, having the chance to conduct archival research prior to entering graduate school was a great opportunity. The Wende Museum’s archive is small by most standards, but it is still cavernous (and cold! The work stations within it were actually equipped with space heaters) enough to earn its nickname of “the Vault.” While working at the Wende, I learned important lessons about how to locate specific documents from within this vast, frigid space and how to handle them. In the case of the Wende, they have a well-organized digital database with all of the collection indexed to a series of tags and with searchable descriptions, thus providing for easy navigation within the archive.

2) How to interpret cultural artifacts. The main goal of the Wende Museum is to archive cultural artifacts and not simply retell the basic history of the German Democratic Republic; therefore, their archives are stocked not with Stasi documents or transcriptions of political meetings but with home magazines, books and consumer electronics (to name a few examples). Artifacts like these have a lot to teach us; they serve as windows into the everyday life (or Alltagsleben, if you will) of a society that, for the most part, no longer exists. Through cultural artifacts, one can determine and analyze a variety of attributes. To use an example from my own research, I used popular antifascist films to examine East Germans perceptions of their role in the Second World War and how the Socialist Unity Party fostered the antifascist foundational mythology of the GDR. I also had the opportunity to work with the East German lifestyle magazine Kultur im Heim. Researching this magazine afforded me the opportunity to look into East German everyday life and consumer culture to analyze issues such as private spaces, East German design philosophy, and how the state’s political agenda was realized through consumer goods. For example, the heavy use of plastic in new toys, tools and cookware was a direct result of the regime’s “pushing” of plastics to strengthen one of the GDR’s strongest domestic industries. Admittedly, not every historian studies cultural history. However, analyzing cultural artifacts is an important and at times overlooked skill, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to develop it.

Every undergraduate student of history should pursue the opportunity to conduct first-hand primary-document research. Of course there is nothing wrong with the classic method of conducting research in the library, writing the paper, and turning it in all without leaving campus; but if the opportunity to go out and conduct history in a “real-world” setting exists, it shouldn’t be passed up. Without the academic foundation that I built up with the help of the Wende’s archives, I likely would not have done the academic work that resulted in my application and acceptance to a Ph.D. program at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where I am continuing my work on 20^th-century Central and Eastern Europe.

Nolan Rivkin graduated from Loyola Marymount University in May 2013 with a major in History and minors in both German and Jewish Studies. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville, working with Dr. Monica Black.

Out of the Classroom, Into the Museum: An Update about the Wende Museum Workshop

In May 2013 (see our archive), I wrote a series of entries about an undergraduate research experience I helped to organize and supervise, where Loyola Marymount University students went out into the community to do research at a local museum, the Wende Museum, and to curate, in collaboration with students from the University of Leipzig, an online exhibition. The exhibition, “Living in a Socialist City: Urban Strategies in East Germany,” is now online at the museum’s website: http://www.wendemuseum.org/programs/living-socialist-city-urban-strategies-east-germany. It can be viewed in either English or German.

Rethinking the Senior Project in History, Part II Eric Kurlander, Stetson University

In my September 8^th post, I outlined some ways of rethinking the Senior Project in History, which I hoped to test in teaching the Fall 2013 History Department Senior Research capstone course. For the Senior Project, History majors must research and write a primary-source based, historiographically-informed paper of article length (ca. 8,000 words) that makes an original scholarly argument. The changes made to previous iterations of the course included: 1) Contacting my senior research students early in the summer to discuss their topics and think of ways to combine their scholarly interests with my own areas of expertise. 2) Enhancing the structured peer review elements of the course. 3) Researching and writing an article, drawn from my own research, alongside the students, inviting their peer review at every stage of the process. With the semester over and student evaluations at hand, I can now reflect on the results of this experiment.

Trying to match student research interests to my own yielded seven projects in fourteen that tied in loosely with my geographical or methodological areas of expertise. While the three best projects fell into this group, the next four best papers were in periods or fields almost entirely unrelated to my areas of interest. Hence, it is not clear that an advisor’s familiarity with the student’s research is essential to the quality of the project. Rather, two other factors appeared crucial: peer review (see below) and the “Research Intensive” methodology classes that precede our Senior Research capstone. These seminars first introduce students in some depth to the diverse historiography and range of primary sources available on a major topic in the field (“The French Revolution”, “The Holocaust”, “The Fall of Rome”, “The Birth of Modern America”, etc.) and culminate in a significant (15-20 page) primary source-based research paper.  Students who did not take both of “Research Intensive” courses prior to the capstone were at a clear disadvantage, even where they chose topics with which I was more familiar. Moreover, the students remarked in the evaluations on the importance of taking both “Research Intensive” methodology classes prior to the Senior Capstone. Hence the student’s methodological preparation may be more important, at least in History, than the advisor’s familiarity with the project.

In respect to peer review, the core element of the class, we read and commented on each other’s work two out of every three weeks, first when presenting our next stage of research and/or writing, and then after posting our prospecti, introductions, first drafts, second drafts, and final drafts on “Blackboard” for everyone to access. One way I enhanced this process in Fall 2013 is by attempting to alternate peer review groups between students covering similar periods or geographical areas (twenieth century, Europe, North America, etc.) with groups based on similar methodology (cultural, intellectual, and art history; war and diplomacy; subaltern studies). Another way I attemped to enhance the peer review process was by researching and writing an article, drawn from my own research, alongside the students. I tried to alternate the group that reviewed my work from unit to unit, so that everyone had a chance to critque the professor. In the evaluations, students reported that the peer review process the best part of the course. Many also commented positively on working with the same group of students, whether based on similar topics or along similar methodological lines, for the entire semester. While students tended not to give much specific feedback on peer reviewing my article–– I probably should have added a specific question to that effect–– students did relate independently the value of reading my drafts as a model for their own. They also appreciated the democratc and collegial element it introduced to the classroom environment. Needless to say, I benefited from having to meet the weekly deadlines and student peer review, producing a nearly finished article as a result.

Ultimately, I found this semester to be the most rewarding Senior Project of my career. The experiment did not bear out all my “hypotheses,” notably in trying to align students’ projects with my own areas of expertise. But it might provide a few lessons for advising the Senior Project in History elsewhere. First, it reinforced the importance of regular class meetings structured around peer review, the core aspect of the class. Second, it suggested that students benefit by working in groups based on thematic interest and methodology. Third, it showed that researching and writing an article or chapter alongside the students can be a valuable pedagogical tool and useful in a faculty member’s own professional development. Finally, it reinforced the importance–– borne out by our department’s self-assessments—of requiring rigorous methodology courses prior to Senior Research. 

Undergraduate Research Journal in German Studies or History

The best college students spend hours writing research papers — collecting materials, analyzing their findings, and fine-tuning their writing. Too often, though, the products of these efforts end up being read by their professors and perhaps a devoted parent or friend, then to be filed away and never to be seen again.

 This blog post suggests a way that students could build on their semester’s work and share their research findings within their college community. At my institution, Indiana University South Bend, my department has pioneered an undergraduate research journal course for one-unit of credit. In this course, the student editor-in-chief of the journal co-teaches the course with one faculty member, and the enrolled students become assistant editors for the journal. The students in the class craft the criteria for acceptance of journal articles; they select the articles to be published; they work closely with authors to improve the articles, and then they copy-edit the final products. The course is as beneficial for the assistant editors as it is for the article authors in that students have a chance to deepen their understanding of what makes for excellent academic writing. They can see the kind of research their fellow students can produce and learn to debate collegially with the fellow members of their course. In this way, students in this class practice the soft skills that 21st century employers are seeking that relate to leadership, team building, and interpersonal communication.

The students in the department’s research journal have gone on to work as the core of the department’s student club. The sense of community that was created through this course, as well as the common commitment to high academic standards, continues to mold the student culture in our department.

 I teach in a small history department and our journal is a history journal, but there is no reason that this model of a journal production course would not work equally well for a German Studies department or program.

Finally this model of a 1-unit course provides some way to acknowledge the hands-on work of faculty members in mentoring student research. At my institution, after a faculty member teaches this 1-unit the course three times, that faculty member receives a one semester course reduction.

For more information see this semester’s syllabus here
https://www.iusb.edu/journal-hist/

I also welcome questions and comments at this blog or directly to my email at zwicker [at] iusb.edu

The Berkeley Prize for Undergraduate Essays in German Studies

BURG/es is happy to announce a new prize recognizing outstanding undergraduate research from the Department of German at the University of California Berkeley. The announcement from UC-Berkeley is below, including contact information for further questions.

The Berkeley Undergraduate Essay Prize is awarded annually by the Department of German for outstanding unpublished papers written during the previous calendar year by undergraduate students enrolled at a North American university/college. Thus the 2014 prize will consider papers written during 2013 on a broad range of topics in German studies. The winning essays carry a cash award of $500 each and will be considered for publication in the department’s electronic journal TRANSIT (http://german.berkeley.edu/transit).

Essays for submission may be written in German or in English; one submission per student. They should be double-spaced, between 3000 and 5000 words in length (including notes and references), and without the student’s name on the paper, since the Awards Committee reads the essays anonymously. A separate cover sheet with the student’s name, title of the paper, address, phone number, and e-address should accompany the submitted essay. The essay may be submitted in hard copy or electronically. The submission deadline is February 15, 2014; winners announced May 2. Send to:

Undergraduate Essay Prize

Attn: Nadia Samadi

German Department

University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley, CA 94720-3243

e-address: germanic@berkeley.edu

Digital Natives, WikiResearch and Lady Gaga’s Interactive Jewel Case

By Todd Herzog

University of Cincinnati

(Posted by forum moderator Todd Heidt)

Every fall, as the new academic year begins, countless articles and blog posts remind us that the incoming crop of first year students came of age in a different historical era than those of us who are teaching them. The granddaddy of them all is The Mindset List, which Ron Nief and Tom McBride of Beloit College have published in various forms since 1997. Indeed, this old-timer is old enough to remember when these lists were disseminated as forwarded e-mails! The list is always a collection of pop cultural references, mostly drawn from the adolescences of the incoming students and the adolescences of the Baby Boom generation. This year’s list, for example, reminds us that we ought to avoid references to Dean Martin or Windows 95, as these will go over our poor students’ heads. We should instead gain our street cred (is this still a term I can use? better check the list) by dropping references to Lady Gaga and the movie Chicken Run.

As silly as these lists are (their fundamental premise is that the sum of our entire historical knowledge consists of events that occurred between our tenth and eighteenth birthdays), they do remind us of one thing: experiences and expectations change over time. The important point of the Mindset List is not to remind us that we need to avoid references to Don Shula or floppy discs. Rather, it should remind us that, as we work to educate the class of 2016, we need to make sure that we understand that they grew up with a fundamentally different means of interacting with information.

Our students’ generation is often referred to by the term digital natives. Unlike us digital immigrants, they grew up in cyberspace. They grew up in an era in which information has always been fundamentally interactive. In a piece that I wrote reacting to the announcement of the first iPad, I noted that:

Our students—until further notice let’s just call them Generation i—have been writing on each others’ Facebook walls, filming video responses to YouTube videos, and assembling their avatars with friends and strangers for raids in World of Warcraft for years now. That student sitting in the back row with his smart phone in front of his face isn’t texting his friends during your lecture; he’s blurring the boundaries between the production and reception of content.

What does all of this have to do with undergraduate research? Well, one of the responses to the casual relationship that these students have with information might be to train them in traditional methods of locating and evaluating resources, as Lynn Marie Kutch nicely argued in a column on this site. I agree that it is important to demonstrate to them that things can be done differently than they had assumed and to introduce them to the still-valid rigorous practices of good old-fashioned research.

But the reverse is also true: we should allow them to teach us that things can be done differently than we had assumed. I learned to research in an era of scarce information. The first problem to overcome was how to track it down. Our digitally native students grew up in an era of abundant information. Their first problem is to learn how to manage and evaluate it. I grew up in an era of knowledge hierarchies in which relatively few had the opportunity to disseminate knowledge. Our digitally native students grew up in an era of democratization of knowledge. We can learn from each other. They can learn that perhaps someone’s opinions expressed in the comments of a blog post might not carry the same weight as those of someone who has devoted years to studying the issue. We can learn that perhaps dynamic, free-flowing knowledge has some advantages.

In a piece I wrote a couple of years ago about research in the information age, I identified four central principles of what I call WikiResearch:

#1: We no longer need to concentrate on teaching students how to track down scarce information; rather, we need to teach them how to manage an abundance of information.

#2: The democratization of knowledge is not only a challenge to researchers; it is one of the greatest positive developments in the age of WikiResearch.

#3: We need to make our publications more public—and that means putting them on the open internet.

#4: Most of the fundamental principles of good, scholarly research remain unchanged.

Even though, when I developed these principles, the class of 2017 was still in Middle School and Reading Rainbow was still on television, I think that they still hold. As we engage in research with these digital natives, let’s remember that research can and should be—as Lady Gaga once tweeted—”an interactive jewel case.”