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William Badke

Trinity Western University, Library, Faculty Member

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Author of Research Strategies: Finding your Way through the Information Fog, 6th ed. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.com, 2017.

Author of Beyond the Answer Sheet: Academic Success for International Students. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.com, 2003.

Author of Teaching Research Processes: The Faculty Role in the Development of Skilled Student Researchers. Oxford: Chandos; Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2012.

CV: http://williambadke.com/badke.htm

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Papers by William Badke

Stepping Outside our Bubble - The Media and Information Literacy Alliance

Online Searcher, 2022

Reading to Write

Purdue University Press eBooks, Jan 15, 2019

Baptised into Moses—Baptised into Christ: A Study in Doctrinal Development

Evangelical Quarterly: An International Review of Bible and Theology

Despite much that has been written on the topic some of the problems surroundiug the origins of C... more Despite much that has been written on the topic some of the problems surroundiug the origins of Christian baptism and of the interpretations attached to it in the early church remain unclear. The librarian at Northwest Baptist Theological College and Seminary here offers some helpful comment on the vexed question of the association of baptism with dying and rising with Christ.

Student Theological Research as an Invitation

Theological Librarianship, 2011

Seminary students, despite having graduated from bachelors programs, struggle to make sense of th... more Seminary students, despite having graduated from bachelors programs, struggle to make sense of the goals, processes, skills, and resources of research as graduate students. Beyond brief introductions to research, a scattered number of seminaries have developed either a separate theological information literacy course or have taken a through-the-curriculum approach to enhancing the information abilities of students. The former, however, separates information literacy from the curriculum, while the latter is difficult to implement and maintain. Living in a world of information glut, seminary professors are finding that traditional information dissemination models of education are becoming less viable. What is more, such models tend to teach students about a discipline rather than inviting them into it. These problems present a unique opportunity to place the teaching of information literacy at the foundation of theological education. With such an approach, students may be invited into...

Research Guides: Art + Design: Journals / Articles

Teaching Faculty to Develop Student Researchers

Online Searcher, 2022

Doing Research Backward: Moving From Conclusion to Information That Supports It

Online Searcher, 2021

What if, having a theory already in place, you find 'evidence' that will support that theory? I n... more What if, having a theory already in place, you find 'evidence' that will support that theory? I n 1982, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln published a book titled, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which had been influenced by an earlier book, L'Or de Rennes, published in 1967. The 1982 book put forward the idea that Jesus did not actually die on the cross but escaped from Judea and married Mary Magdalene. Their children eventually migrated to Southern France, where they became a key royal line. There is more, including a secret society called the Priory of the Sun, that is trying to restore the royal lineage of Jesus to power. If all of this sounds somewhat familiar, it is because the theory is echoed in the book and movie, The Da Vinci Code. With all the attention, this view of history must have some validity, right? Actually, it does only if you subscribe to a method that I call "doing research backward."

Chaos in Scholarly Publishing?

Online Searcher, 2021

Comrade Detective, Information Silos, and the Danger of Shared Belief

Online Searcher, 2021

I n August 2017, a television series, Comrade Detective, debuted on Amazon Prime Video. Billed as... more I n August 2017, a television series, Comrade Detective, debuted on Amazon Prime Video. Billed as a restored lost video from a detective show sponsored by the Communist Romanian cultural affairs department, it showed eastern European communism at its virulent best. The series seemed so real for a couple of reasons. First, the original version was in Romanian, and it had been filmed in Romania, although dialogue had been dubbed by American actors. Second, it rang true to what most of us believe about 1980s communistic societies. But it wasn't real. It was a clever American creation. Comrade Detective is a fake, a spoof created by a team led by actor/producer Channing Tatum. Yet it is instructive on two levels. First, on its face, it models a society dominated by the shared belief that communism had made it a place of perfection, only marred by incursions from the West. There was only one way to think, and anything else was evil. Of course, children should inform on their parents, and people should be arrested for having foreign goods in their homes. We must protect the purity of our society, even if it means that police interrogations are brutal, and smugglers of Western products are executed. Comrade Detective also works on the level of our cultural viewing of it. We assume that this must have been the way it was in 1980s Romania, that everyone was dominated by ideology, and that dissenters were few. We see a monochromatic society portrayed through a detective show and assume that this is what "those people" were like. We stereotype them because they were the enemy (not to mention the fact that the show portrays Americans as fat, hamburger-devouring slobs). Romania and the West are two distinct entities, each believing the worst of the other. This column is about silos, about the fact that we are increasingly, as Eli Pariser put it, caught in filter bubbles-monochromatic views of the world. I know that Pariser's views have come under criticism, but I'm referring to a more pervasive kind of filter bubble that permeates all of our interactions with information.

Celebrate Boring Research

Online Searcher, 2021

Spectacular research findings make the news. There's no question that a newsworthy research study... more Spectacular research findings make the news. There's no question that a newsworthy research study elevates the researchers and their institutions. When you do groundbreaking work, you get better and bigger research grants. You get promotions and tenure. Rainbows appear over your place of work. You feel better about yourself. All is good. If you are a plodder, however, you toil in obscurity. No rainbows or accolades for you. This creates the takeaway that being a research star is going to be a sugarplum dream for many scientists and social scientists.

International Students and Information Literacy

Online Searcher, 2021

The Tail Wags the Dog: Taking Back Control of Our Searches

Online Searcher, 2021

The Tail Wags the Dog: Taking Back Control of Our Searches Search engine algorithms are driven by... more The Tail Wags the Dog: Taking Back Control of Our Searches Search engine algorithms are driven by financial greed masquerading as helpful personalization. I 'll start this column with a bit of nostalgia. When I first started tapping keyboards in the distant past, I was using CP/M, then MS DOS. With DOS, which enlisted text commands to perform various actions, I could modify my startup and essentially tell the operating system what to do. Apple proposed a new scenario that could best be described as, "Let us do all this stuff for you." Apple's operating systems tell you how things are going to be, with little option for your own manipulation. Microsoft has followed the same pattern, trying to keep up with Apple's innovation. Now, my control over how things work online is so limited, I feel like the dog whose tail no longer wags at my command. Instead, the tail wags the dog. If I have a hammer in my hand, I can do what I want with it. The hammer has no say in the matter. If I boot up my computer, however, I am told exactly what I can do and what I can't. It reminds me of the Little Britain skits in which the characters want something done, but an officious receptionist tells them, "Computer says, 'No'" (youtube.com/watch?v=6lweOai_s7E). Who is "computer" to tell me what it will allow? Computer is the hammer. I wield the hammer, don't I? Let's consider some ways in which a lack of tail control hampers the power of the dog.

A Collaborative Graduate Information Literacy Course

Online Searcher, 2020

COVID 19 and the Information Literacy Crisis

Online Searcher, 2020

Evidence and the Search for Truth

Online Searcher, 2020

Working on Information Literacy Concepts

Online Searcher, 2020

How I (try to) teach the Framework

Online Searcher, 2020

Research is not about something you can look up. It's a quest for an answer that is out of sight,... more

Metaliteracy, the Framework, and All Those Other Statements

Online Searcher, 2019

On the Future of Academic Libraries—One More Take

Online Searcher, 2019

A n anonymous response to an Inside Higher Education article in 2013 read as follows: For me and ... more A n anonymous response to an Inside Higher Education article in 2013 read as follows: For me and most of the people I know, everything is available [on] Google, the journals' web sites and the researcher's own pages. The libraries are just places for undergraduates to study and find dates. Seriously. We're spending a fortune to keep these things go ing. I'm happy to move slowly and not shut them down, but aside from a few archival materials, I don't think most scholars use them much at all. Oh, I'm sure there are a few but we need to be real. Google and the Internet have already replaced the libraries.

Open Access and the Developing Researcher

Online Searcher, 2019

D uring the past few years, the pace of open access (OA) publication has in creased dramatically.... more D uring the past few years, the pace of open access (OA) publication has in creased dramatically. This has been fueled primarily by public funding bodies and universities arguing that the public should not have to fund research twiceonce when a grant is issued and again when institutions are required to pay vast sums for the published results through journal subscriptions. A further impetus for OA has been the "information wants to be free" movement typified by pirate sites such as Sci-Hub, which are avidly used by many in the academic community. Pressure tactics have emerged to force OA. Consider SCOAP3, a movement be gun in 2014 to convince educational institutions to redirect subscription costs for high-energy physics journals into a common fund to pay publication costs for ar ticles (scoap3.org). Essentially, these journals would either accept a new funding model for their articles so that the paywalls for them disappeared, or the journals themselves would disappear when institutions no longer paid for subscriptions. Taking another tack, in late 2018, the University of California (UC) urged its fac ulty not to submit articles to Elsevier journals and not to participate as Elsevier peer reviewers. Elsevier was held to blame for charging too much for journals that are publishing research often funded by the public while at the same time enjoying large profits. But here is the wrinkle: UC offered to pay a fee to Elsevier that cut the cost of journals but covered article processing charges (APCs). This would assure that all UC scholars publishing in Elsevier journals could have their work become instandy OA (described as a "read-and-publish agreement" [RAP]; bit.ly/2CmtKli). With lack of progress, UC cut ties with Elsevier entirely in early 2019, following similar can cellations from institutional consortia in Sweden, Germany, and Hungary. SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is keeping track of the "big deal" cancellations (sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking). Norwegian universities were set to cancel as well, but announced, on April 23, 2019, a RAP deal with Elsevier. [RAP agreements are slightly different from Publish and Read (PAR) agreements as detailed by Lisa Janicke Hinchcliffe in her Schol arly Kitchen post, "Transformative