Scholarly journals in workshops

I've been wanting to add this post for a while, and I think it fits in nicely with Emily's previous post. For one of my workshops this quarter (for English Comp), the instructor wanted me to focus on explaining what scholarly articles are and how they are used. I've found that many of our students have not been exposed to the "world" of scholarly journals before, and I think there is a disconnect between information online and what students are used to seeing.

So I decided to bring in some print examples. Since my library doesn't really have a print journal collection, I grabbed some from home (mostly poli sci and humanities, and yes, even a couple Library Journals). I passed them out in the class, and had students start comparing them to popular magazines. We made a comparison list on the board, and talked about what makes scholarly journals so different from popular magazines, and why we use them.

I think this exercise helped the students understand that what they are viewing online is also available in print. It seems to help to have literal, hands-on examples for students to touch and look at it when explaining new concepts. However, I agree with Emily that perhaps our focus should be our online databases, and not print journals. Students may like seeing the resources for themselves, but when it comes to using the resources, they seem to prefer online.