When researching a business topic or launching a new venture, information about industries, markets or competitors can be invaluable for MBA or EMBA students. In this session, we will cover resources from the Internet as well as licensed market and industry intelligence databases available from Concordia University Library. This is a workshop adapted from the “Entrepreneurship” course at the John Molson School of Business.
Locate industry and market reports from the Internet and the Library
Understand how to use datasets from Statistics Canada (Census & Data) and other national agencies
Develop a healthy information diet
COURSE OUTLINE
Finding sources with strong evidence to support claims
Articles: evidence from science and news
Know your market & industry: reports from IBIS Wrold; SME Benchmarking; Mergent Intellect
Using Google for business research: trade associations & governments
Statistics Canada for entrepreneurs: Census & CANSIM
Library services
1. Finding sources with strong evidence to support your business or academic claims
When making a claim in a paper or a presentation, you need to locate and cite the best source with strong evidence. To navigate the breadth and depth of the information universe, you need to recognize certain social, economic or political processes at play. Here is a simple framework to tap into various information lifecycles:
2. Articles: evidence from science and news news
Getting started: read articles from encyclopedias such as Wikipedia or International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences to get a sense of the literature. Look at the jargon used, navigate the “see also” links and download the articles cited therein. Books, such as your textbook, handbooks or monographs from Sofia, the library catalogue, are also relevant. Remember: do not cite encyclopedia articles, you have to access the peer-reviewed articles cited in encyclopedia entries!
Three words about Generative Artificial Intelligence: plagiarism; hallucinations and empowerment.
Now that we’ve sorted out some details, here are some tools and tips for locating business intelligence from articles:
Think about your business idea when searching, use a variety of keywords:
Some useful searches: household spending; retail trade sales; labour force survey; Neighbourhood income and demographics; family income; NAICS Statistics
Click on “Add/remouve data” when looking at a data table to toggle data dimensions
First up is Dr. Leo Lo – providing an engaging keynote about the roles of librarians in the conversation about AI and CT on campus, balancing enthusiasm and caution around the uncertainty as the field grows. The goal is to position librarians as the place on campus to bring faculty and students together, with an eye on employability. Focus on empowerment & try different things.
Critical skills include:
Analytical thinking & prompt engineering
AI literacy, notably around capabilities & limits of AI
Ethical reasoning around core values & principles
Continuous learning
Roles of librarians:
Resource curators
AI Advocates
Libraries as campus collaborative hubs (spaces, devise & promote best practices)
Ethics discussion leaders
Recent paper:
Lo, L. S. (2023). The CLEAR path: A framework for enhancing information literacy through prompt engineering. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 49(4), [102720]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102720
J. Michael Spector highlights the importance of John Dewey’s How we think (1910, 2011) in learning by experience, especially at the onset on a student’s career – in middle school.
Madeleine Mejia offers a powerful analysis of using technology in CT, leveraging many thinkers such as Facione (1990). See her recent article:
Mejia, M., & Sargent, J. M. (2023). Leveraging Technology to Develop Students’ Critical Thinking Skills. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 51(4), 393–418. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472395231166613
Raymond Pun proposes many concrete ideas for curating a learning experience around CT & AI. Here is a good list of ethical issues to consider with AI by Raymond Pun:
Ethical Considerations of critical thinking and artificial intelligence. Source: Raymond Pun, academic and research librarian at the Alder Graduate School of Education, during the Sage 2023 Critical Thinking Boot Camp. Screen Capture during live presentation.
2nd Panel – mis/dis-information
Altay, S., Berriche, M., & Acerbi, A. (2023). Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges. Social Media + Society, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221150412
Dan Chibnall, STEM Librarian, Drake University: fact checking is a proactive approach, not reactive. Truth, noise – ChatGPT will exacerbate the problem. Beware of offloading CT and learning to these tools. Cognitive biases and confirmation bias… and the loss of discovery (auto pilot of letting the tools doing the work).
Richard Wood, associate professor of practice at the Norton School of Human Ecology, University of Arizona. Critical thinking requires a lot of energy, your brain is mobilized in ways many find uncomfortable. The ladder of abstraction (deconstruct statements), enthymeme (Aristote), evidence to support premises: how to approach claims. Science does not “prove” it provides insight and evidence toward a consensus.
Brooklyne Gipson, assistant professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Teaches race and gender issues. Alternate epistemologies, mindfulness of this space. Acknowledge that differences may be socialized from one’s past and are a key component of identity. LLMs and GPTs simply regurgitate variations of what is said, no fact checking. Engaged pedagogy. Rooted in social media space, acknowledge media literacy and bias as a shifting dimension.
Richard Rosen, retired professor of practice and chair of the Personal and Family Financial Planning program at the University of Arizona. Bill Gates: AI is probably the biggest development in computing since the personal computer. Endemic cheating. Early 1980s: calculators enter colleges. Do AI make up facts? Are AI and search engines the same? Lawyer in Texas using ChatGPT to look for case law & hallucinations. Use but verify. Facts vs opinions. Find the source.
3rd Panel – what students want from AI and what they want you to know
Sarah Morris, librarian & PhD student. Finish an assignment asap. Understanding AI: opportunities, challenges, limitations. Points of interest: AI literacy; possibilities/limitations; Policy issues; algorithmic literacy = dealing with assumptions and identifying knowledge gaps. Job prospects; lifelong learning; ways to connect to lived experiences of students.
Brady Beard, reference and instruction librarian at Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. Humans in the loop of the information landscape. Looking for hallucinated citations and sources. Generative AI is not absolutely novel in many ways considering recent developments. Librarians are non-evaluative contributors to the learning experience, it is easier to be truthful about one’s approaches to their work. Reframe conversations about plagiarism and academic integrity: this is not the way forward as these tools have great promise for the future. Adjust our assessments (e.g.: oral examination in a Zoom call). These systems are not magic… using the term “hallucination” places agency in algorithms that they don’t have. What are the costs of these systems and tools.
I am sorry to miss the end of this Boot Camp as I have another commitment. Apologies to Hannah Pearson, fiction writer and Anne Lester, graduate student, for missing their presentations.
Chatbots, abundant intelligence (AI) and other algorithms have impacted librarianship since I’ve started working at Concordia 20 years ago. I remember a time of card catalogues, microfilm and the smell of toner. During my tenure, I’ve seen the emergence of Google, Wikipedia, iPhones, social media’s echo chambers & fake news, open access, open data, open sesame (that was an Alibaba joke), and so many pictures of kittens… which is to say, the only thing to fear is fear itself: don’t be a tool for AI, understand how to use it so it doesn’t own you. I’ve started using this logic in my lectures to business undergrads this semester: “if you use the top 10 hits in Google for your paper, you’re already obsolete because an algorithm is cheaper and more powerful than you.” Job prospects are a great motivating factor for JMSB students!
I’ve always had a knack to keep the attention of students. This time, they were begging me to help them avoid plagiarism and develop searching and analytical skills a librarian can provide. This builds on the knowledge provided by your disciplinary knowledge. The next decade will be as fascinating as it will be exciting. I am confident I will see libraries into the next Millenia. I’m not so sure about the contemporary form of Universities, though.
I like to remind myself that Socrates had a gripe against the written word. Quill, ink and parchment were a disruptive technology after all, and they feared that it would eliminate the skills required for societal discourse. Ditto for church leaders and that pesky invention called the movable type… And yet, here we are. Universities are a rather “recent” institution (at 1000+ years), compared to libraries (3000+ years), archives (at an impressive 5000-8000+ years) and cities… which archeologists point out existed well before the existence of (“big H”) Western style History (you know, the kind which uses traces and other records).
I would like to venture two hypothesis that ChatGPT brings to light with regards to teaching and learning in Universities. First, that the lecture (of the synchronous, on-site or online, “butts in seats” or “faces on screen” and “prof in front” kind) is quickly becoming a superfluous and an oddly conspicuously anachronistic use of everyone’s time. Second, that the standard academic paper, which is the echo of the lecture, really, is following suit.
What are we to do, then? Simple. The rhetoric about experiential and blended learning and other trends of teaching and learning are pointing the way forward. Oh, and open education too. (ok, ok, preaching for my parish, I know, but really, the only people who have harder knuckles than librarians are, well, archivists, having survived power struggles and the occasional fire for millennia, so you should probably see through my trauma & bias and listen).
I have spent the past decade studying how to lead artistic and cultural organisations through what highly priced consultants call digital transformation (pro tip: write a good copyright license for a simple technological community tool and you will transform for the better). I sense that we are overdue for a very serious conversation about how we all collaborate (within departments, between Universities, etc.) as well as what we consider valuable use of everyone’s time. Having a small army of humans draft papers that are essentially thrown away seems like rather wasteful, particularly given that we now have technological and legal methods to capture micro-contributions to build stunning knowledge objects. We also need to talk about who owns the ideas we generate and the methods or means we have to make them available. Let’s remember we owe that to those who pay for our nice buildings and pensions.
If we don’t discuss, it won’t be long that most of us (not I!) will be left in the dust by a abundant intelligence (AI).
This essay was inspired by the conversations provided during Concordia’s Digital Skill Share Days Conference, an on-campus level up activity for staff and faculty (Feb 9-10 2023) of which I am a member of the organizing committee.
These words were written by my hand directly on a keyboard, on this website. (reposted from my Faculty Union’s private forum)
Olivier Charbonneau is an associate Librarian at Concordia University, Olivier Charbonneau is primarily interested in copyright issues as well as questions of open access and Web 2.0. He is a doctoral student at the Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal. He has over 15 years of professional involvement in library and cultural communities. He holds two masters degrees from Université de Montréal, one in information sciences and another in law, as well as an undergraduate degree in commerce from McGill University.
