What came to my mind while working through the virtual session “Internet Research”

Let’s enter the world of Internet Research…

 

 

 

I am doing research on the internet many times a day; but on a very basic level: I am looking up office hours, restaurants, train connections, movie times, phone numbers and so on. I realized, however, that I am hardly ever researching the internet for term papers or other university based projects. Stop, that is not true either. I do research the internet for presentations that I have to give at university, I am just not admitting it when professors ask. I know that this is bad but it is reality and the question should be: “what does this tell us about the acceptance of internet sources by professors?” There seems to be a certain generation of professors (and teachers in general) that regards information found on the internet as the end to academic work ethic. I understand how they came to this opinion since in the beginning of common internet use, some students abused the system by downloading whole essays, and plagiarism became a bigger issue than it was before. But times changed since then! I honestly never even thought about just downloading a term paper and trying to hand it in as my own. You can track sparknotes-summaries by typing in five coherent words of the summary in google. Five words out of a whole essay are enough to prove your plagiarism! Who has not figured that out yet and still tries to cheat that way might not belong at university in the first place!

Anyways, there is also very useful knowledge in academic sources on the internet and most students are not using them because they are afraid of even quoting that source in their bibliography.

Not all professors are like that though. I remember writing my first term paper ever for Mr. Handke and he required the use of at least one internet source. That seemed unnecessary to me at the time but now I understand that he does that to force his students to use the internet as an academic tool as well. That is actually great, and I do not know if anybody ever thanked him for that .

 Coming back to the virtual session, I can say that I was familiar with at least 90% of the contents presented. I did not know that I am using “and, or, not” in search queries because Mr. Boolean invented this system, but at least I use them frequently. Still, it is good to know the background on this in case I am presenting Internet Research in class some day (which I probably will because I think it is important and this virtual session will be a good starting point for planning the lesson J ). Same about how to quote internet sources and how to evaluate internet sources… It was not new to me but it is always good to freshen up one’s knowledge!

 I really liked that this virtual session did not denounce Wikis and especially Wikipedia as the born evil. Bringing up Wikipedia in class at University seems to be worse than talking on your cell phone while the teacher is speaking! I get it, Wikipedia is not a very reliable source but it is not as bad as professors think!!! It just depends on the purpose of its use. Of course, Wikipedia is not the place to find information for a term paper at, but you can still use it in order to prepare for class. If I had a course on Flannery O’Connor, I would not use Wikipedia when writing my term paper but I would use it find out before the class starts who that person is, when she lived, what she wrote. And believe it or not, Wikipedia is a great source for basic information like this. So, I was happy to read in this week’s session that Wikis are good to gather basic knowledge and to start research.

 To come to a conclusion about the virtual session “Internet Research”, I can say that I took some advantage from it by gaining background knowledge on certain things. It would have been even more fruitful if the Utilization part had worked; and I would have wished some examples for Meta Search Engines or Catalogues, though.

Still, I feel the urge to try a guided or half-guided Search in class with my students now. It is always great when something you learn at University inspires you for the real teacher life J  

 

~ by inesrosenbaum on November 16, 2008.