Point. Click. Think? An interesting little article about the impact of the web on the way students work. Snippet: "Students' first recourse for any kind of information is the Web. It's absolutely automatic," says Kenneth Kotovsky... Net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connections easily. "They are more in control of facts than we were 40 years ago," says Bernard Cooperman, a history professor at the University of Maryland. But they also value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth, and other people's arguments over their own. This has educators worried.
There is also the tendency of students to believe that any article that appears on the Web is true and correct. Wes
For information to appear on the web, someone has to put it there. Often this someone has a point they're trying to make that is not reprentative of any wide concensus of opinion in a particular field. I have often found things that I consider simply incorrect.
web based essays As a high school teacher, most of the time I receive from students essays that have been sourced exclusively from the web. It is rare that I am presented with a piece of work that references a books or even a book. Usually such work comes only from high achieving students. It is also apparent to me while marking that the temptation to plagiarize is epidemic. Students don't seem to realize that I am just as able to find articles and essays on the web as they are, usually a google search will do the job. A lot of the time such web based plagiarized work is just sheer quackery anyway.
Online Libraries Online libraries are indispensable too. I can find 100 professional articles on the WWW in less than 20 hours. Using the old fashioned library, it would take me weeks. Students who are turning in inferior sources haven’t been shown how to properly find references. The WWW brings us closer to “collective reasoning.”
harder information to evaluate In many ways the internet combines misinformation with information. It is hard for many people to sort out the difference. The goal of education should be to help students develop methods of sorting the wheat and chaff on the internet. How to identify good websites. How to find legitimate on-line libraries. And to separate the world of opinion on the net, from fact. All the best!
reply to irat Yes I agree the problem is that many high school students can't seperate solid scholarship from quackery. Of course despite promises from government their access to computers is limited to how many there are in the school for students to use (cuts in Ontario have actually hit traditional library access too.) Some of the students I teach (behaviorally identified) are hard on computers, they steal the balls out of the mice, wreck CD drives by pulling and pushing them etc. Easy to say "the teacher should have better control" however, if they mis-behave the worst they usually get is three days off. The main goal of education varies as to who you talk to. Many (not all) academic grade senior high school students would say the goal of education is to get a well paid job. I was educated to believe it is to 'water the gardens of the mind.' Since one of my teachables is manufacturing technology, most of my contacts amongst industrial employers hold that the goal of education is to produce factory fodder at no cost to them. Amongst the educated middle class parents they belive it is to get their daughter or son into university. Amongst the rest there are those who have aspirations for their children who take the view that education is the route to a better career. Also amongst the rest are those parents who hold that education is a bunch of c--p run by teachers who treat their sons and daughters as they were shamefully treated. There are also those who simply have scant value education in any form. This is of course just a few thoughts and observations, not the gospel according to Roy Maybery. However, often I feel like a voice crying in the wilderness.
