Imagine what today's teachers--at least, those who still assign thoughtful essays--must contend with.
Yahoo! Answers—a site where anyone can post a question in plain English, including queries that can't be answered by a traditional search engine—now draws 120 million users worldwide, according to Yahoo!'s internal stats...
The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It's every middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web.
Throw in Wikipedia, and one wonders if today's students will ever even encounter a "scholarly source". But wait--it gets worse.
For educators fretting that the Internet is creating a generation of "intellectual sluggards," the problem isn't just that Yahoo!'s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework. It's that a lot of the time, it doesn't help them cheat all that well.
Footnotes, endnotes, sources cited--something has to serve as an honest broker here.
2 comments:
I have noticed the very same thing. Kids are treating everything on the web as good source material either from ignorance or laziness. I have banned the use of wikipedia as a source for their papers. If they use wikipedia or do not properly cite their work, they have to rewrite their papers. I also try to teach them that while wikipedia can be an ok place to start from they have to verify anything they find. Meanwhile, I also point them to legitimate research sites.
LOL, this is only a problem if they are actually given a homework assignment to begin with. It seems the 7th grade math department at my middle school, from regular to most advanced track have all adopted a "no homework" philosophy. Beam me up.
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