Got a bit intrigued with this article on The Argus UK about a university lecturer bannng students from using Google and Wikipedia, adding that many students don’t use their own brains enough in doing research and analysis.
It has been debated for quite some time that the use of Wikipedia by university students should be discouraged. In recent years, more and more students are relying on the internet for their term papers and doing research. The library has now been ditched in favor of the world wide web.
Prof Brabazon said: “The education world has pursued new technology with an almost evangelical zeal and it is time to take a step back and give proper consideration of how we use it. Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.” She calls this phenomenon The University of Google.
She said thousands of students across the country, including those at the universities of Brighton and Sussex, were churning out banal and mediocre work by using what search engines provided them.
During my college years, when the internet was sting young and not a lot of information was available online, most of the research that I do came from stacks of books, CD encyclopedias and microfiches. It was tedious, very time consuming, expensive (tons of print-outs) and sometimes the statistical data I gather are outdated.
Back then, I didn’t know Google. I was using Alta Vista and Yahoo most of the time while Wikipedia was not yet born.
“I ban my students from using Google, Wikipedia and other websites like that. I give them a reading list to work from and expect them to cite a good number of them in any work they produce.”
She said young people were finishing education with shallow ideas and needed to learn interpretative skills before starting to use technology.
Compare that to today’s vast resources on the internet. Student programmers can always sneak into Google Code Search and copy a snippet of code, chem students can read up on how to mix nitric and sulfuric acids and end up cooking trinitroglycerin, or totally copy and paste and entire Wikipedia entry on Magellan’s discovery of the Philippines islands.
Of course, not everyone will do that. But, with the right amount of academic pressure, sometimes these kids will do just about anything just to get a passing mark. Most will go the path of least resistance.
Still, I think it’s all up to the students. To those who’ve just graduated recently or are still studying, is the internet a necessary tool in your research?
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There is no doubt that the internet is very useful in research. In my case, it gives me access to journal articles, contacts with other researchers, access to softwares for analyses, and keep me up to date with the latest in my field. I guess it’s really up to the students if they will fall into the trap of relying too much on the internet for their assignments.
I think there should be a balance.
Wikipedia though is a no-no for me when it comes to research papers.
First, a disclaimer: I’m quite active at the Wikipedia, so I may have a bias here. But I’ll do my best to avoid that
Second: the problem, as I see it, is that for some students, research has merely become a cut-and-paste thing. When I was studying in high school way, way before people even heard of Yahoo (and way back when Google was still just a post-grad project at Standford U.), the most hi-tech research tool we had in our library was a couple of computer terminals with the online edition of Grolier’s Encyclopedia running on it. Students were notorious for copying and pasting the articles without even citing where they got it, and submitted the hodge-podge article as their own “research paper”. So it wasn’t quite a surprise when, in college, I still found some students doing the same thing—this time, with the Internet (and that was even before Wikipedia became online).
The reliability of Wikipedia (and, one may argue, of encyclopedias in general) is still debatable, but for me the more pressing issue is how students do their research. Are students these days as scrutinizing as we believe they should when they are working on their research papers? Are they giving enough effort to provide their own inputs (if not formulate new ideas) based on their own research materials?
I use Wikipedia and Google a lot. I hardly visit our library nowadays, but do I have any choice? Our library does not have the books that I need for my research.
ang maganda sa wikipedia eh free cya unlike some other online libraries na may subscription fee.
I remember my daughter had to submit a bibliography of books for any research paper. In certain occasions, there are not many books on topics such as blogs, blogging so that’s when the internet is needed. Other than that, I believe books should be a more reliable research material.
Yup. I owned a little internet shop last last year and I see the students just copy and paste the articles found in wiki and google with no effort at all!
Can’t researchers try to find the primary source of a Wikipedia article by looking at the footnotes?
I think Wikipedia is bad for kids too. many of the famous porn stars have their biography on WIKIPEDIA. BAD for the kids. Look for Crystal Klein, shes in WIKIPEDIA.
Both google and wikipedia are important tools when doing research regardless whether you are a student or not.
As with all research work done using online references… not everything you read is factual so don’t rely on a single source… you should do your homework by checking that the info posted have been verified or came from a legit and reliable source and try to cross reference it with other reputable sites.
In our school, because of this “copy and paste”, some teachers copy a phrase, a sentence or a paragraph from a student’s paper work and google it. Kapag may perfect match, yari! Plagiarized work! It’s either you fail that paper or fail the whole subject.
There’s another side to this tale. If you actually contribute to Wikipedia (and have internalized its “three pillars”) and use Google for tracking down sources, you actually become a better student/researcher since you’ll learn to respect copyrights, cite sources, write and synthesize material, and analyze information.
Books nowadays are not reliable too. Just take a look at the textbooks used in Philippine public schools.
Wikipedia and Google are not bad for kids. All sources of information have their pros and cons.
Even the best encyclopedias out there cannot claim 100% accuracy as all published academic books lag three (3) years in terms of updated information. This is precisely the reason for the existence of academic journals.
It’s a matter of how students and reseachers use the medium.
ako depende kung ano yung hinahanap, yung wikipedia naman kasi free for all ang editing kaya parang hindi mo mapapagtiwalaan hehe
pero books parin!
As a teacher I don’t encourage students from searching google for information. It’s the easiest way to access information for their requirements. My challenge as a teacher is to lead students to the right websites. As for programming, it is also now a challenge for teachers to develop own programming problems and not relying on books for the activities. This will prevent students from just copying and pasting it. We should not also forget that students have the most creative ways of trying to do things the easiest.
I think depende pa din sa estudyante, pag mga tamad mag-aral, download then submit sa prof then bahala na sa exam, pag masipag na student, download, basa then lagay sa utak, then submit sa prof, prepare para sa exam.
What that professor wrote and I quote:
is nothing extraordinary. That is a “must” in the syllabus preparation.
The syllabus is not merely a list of topics to be discussed during the semester; it also provides the suggested readings or the bibliography of books that the students can use to comply with the requirements.
Some professors merely copy the titles of the books that they include in their syllabi which make them worse than their students who do not know the importance of the books that are found in the bibliography. There are even lecturers who do not give syllabi to the students. If ever they do, they were merely outlines of the chapters of the textbooks that they use.
The thing is, these professors should have read whatever references are given, cite the chapters as well as the pages so that the students will do the same in the preparation of the paper which is better known as FOOTNOTING.
To merit the title the word professor, the academician should be several volumes of books ahead of the students and not just one chapter away.
The research design will also lessen the students’
copy and paste practices. If the research paper asks for the student opinion/observation/ conclusions based on the data gathered, the writer will be pressured to do better than merely copying. First thing I do when I get hold of the research paper is to read the review of related literature. This should contain whatever principles, theories or facts that the researcher found to have contributed to his own research. The researcher’s agreement or disagreement with these findings would give me the depth of how the research was conducted.
Most of the teachers in UP are banning the use of Wikipedia. Grrrr.. We had to use the library to search topics like anti-matter..huhu.. How on earth can we find the topics like that in a century old archive?
Wikipedia can be a GUIDE, but it isn’t good to have it as your sole source for information–especially when you are making academic stuff–since anyone there can be an expert.
Ca t said and i quote “First thing I do when I get hold of the research paper is to read the review of related literature. This should contain whatever principles, theories or facts that the researcher found to have contributed to his own research. The researcher’s agreement or disagreement with these findings would give me the depth of how the research was conducted.”
I agree with cat’s last line. A researcher has to agree or dispute on existing theories and findings then elaborate to a more in depth theories of his own. The problem of most students, undergrad and even grad students (in the Philippines), is that the related literature is copied from books or worse from Wiki. Most think that the review of related literature is just like a chapter of a book, that you can just copy a paragraph just the way it is written. Maybe even teachers think that same manner too.
But it mustn’t be like that. If a professor has to be strict on research studies done by undergrads (who don’t have enough background to properly conduct such a mentally-stressful task or write a research paper), then the students must be taught “proper research”. One way is to only accept peer reviewed articles in the related literature. No magazine/newspaper citing. No website address citing. No conference proceeding citing. But just pure peer reviewed papers. These papers can be found in scientific journals related to the field of study and in most cases are published semi-annually. If this option is taken, students will be forced to search for these papers, read and cite and use them for their own work.
I have done a lot of scientific research in Pinas and abroad and saw in my own two eyes how students built their papers from unreliable sources. Wiki is not really bad information-wise. But that’s it. It must not be copied nor cited in research papers.
But I do have a question – why ban Google? Finding the right stuff for your research can be done by simple Googling. Google scholar for instance is a good medium to broadly search for scholarly literature.
“From Google scholar, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.”
The technology we have today must not be seen as a difficult wall to climb for the development of future researchers. Teachers and students must learn to appreciate how the technology can help research scientists to reach their full potentials.
If I were the teacher, I’ll cut and paste a couple of sentences/phrases from the works of my students to the google search bar. If I see that there is an exact match, even if it is just one paragraph, I’ll let them fail.
Use the same technology hehehe.
the question is do these teachers ever read the term papers?
the grade of research or term paper constitutes a small percentage of the final grade.
Not unless the student presents a complete plagiarized work, can you justify a failing grade.
Get real.
Interesting topic. I taught a bachelor’s level theological class last year. I actually gave the students and assignment which required them to find internet articles. The reason was I wanted them to get used to using the ‘net for research (some of the students were older and not used to using it). It was a small class, so the students were required to make copies of their work for their peers. The idea was to teach them to use the internet for research and to help each other in the process. Wikipedia articles were not allowed.
I agree with some of the others that there has to be a balance. Just using wikipedia is no good. At the same time, the internet offers a virtually unlimited amount of information–even to those with limited library access.
I used the internet for some of my research back when I was doing graduate studies. The trickiest part was citing it according to the format that my school required.
The book I’m about to publish would not have been possible without internet research. My book is not really an academic work (its a book about relationships), but I did my best to make sure my sources of info were good. I never would have found my stats without search engines.
OK, I’m rambling . . . time to go to bed.
Now this issue opens up another issue.
How would you define plagiarism? If I change some words to something equivalent or synonymous (so that the professor wouldn’t find it online) and keeping the thought or ideas intact, would that be plagiarism? It still is!
My colleagues and I had a big debate with professors/scientists/researchers about plagiarism last year and we couldn’t resolve the issue. Plagiarism is also very complicated in itself.
okay, i don;t want to start a new forum here…
What about considering Intute? It’s a free service with thousands of documents that allows academics, teachers, researchers and students to browse for information relating specifically to their field of expertise.
Just came out today:
http://salaswildthoughts.blogspot.com/2008/01/intute-search-engine-for-teachers.html
cool post dude
P7UOW9 hi nice site thx http://peace.com
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