Addressing Information Overload

The point to stress here is that we cannot teach students everything that they will find useful in later life. But we can teach them how to find, and then evaluate, the information they will need. Interdisciplinary scholarship guides students in both searching and evaluating insights across disciplines.

The library classifications in use in university and public libraries are organized around disciplines. They use different terminology and are organized differently by discipline. A disciplinary education will acquaint students with (at most) how one discipline is treated in the library. Students in interdisciplinary courses will generally be required to engage with multiple disciplines. Textbooks on how to perform interdisciplinary research [See Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration] generally provide some guidance on how to undertake an interdisciplinary literature search.

Students -- perhaps especially in the era of the Internet -- need then to know how to critically evaluate what they read. Interdisciplinary education provides some important critical tools: placing insights in the context of the disciplinary perspective of the author; developing some familiarity with the key strengths and weaknesses of different methods; seeking out and comparing different points of view. These interdisciplinary approaches to evaluation complement disciplinary approaches which tend to emphasize the proper/best way to employ the discipline's theories and methods. Interdisciplinary education thus communicates a set of critical thinking Skills that are important complements to those mastered within disciplines. [Again the texts listed in Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration are useful resources.]