Internet Only Bibliography?

The Gotham Gal posted today about a debate raging in our house this week.

Jessica wanted to turn in a paper with a bibliography that only contained Internet URLs.  That's not allowed at her school.  She needs to read some books and consider some other offline sources.

The unanimous feeling in our home is that the school's policy is antiquated.  With Google Scholar and the coming Google Library, we'll have most of the same books that Jessica is supposed to be going to the libary to review available online.  And you've got Answers.com and Wikipedia.  The list of amazing online research resources just keeps growing and growing.

So The Gotham Gal told the school principal that she thought the "no Internet only bibliographies policy" was wrong.  He came back with a very thoughtful response.  He said the "instant gratification" (my words not his) of internet research was leading to "cut and paste" (again my words not his) reports and the reason he wants kids to use offline resources is that it forces them to take time and think and construct real reports.

Now that's a great point.  He's right about that.  I see it in Jessica's work to be honest.  It's good, but it does feel a little manufactured. 

But I wonder if technology isn't a better solution to that problem.  What if instead of creating paper reports, the kids had to post their reseach and thoughts online, subject them to comment and editing online, and evolve them over time from raw research to thoughtful considered online papers?

Maybe that's too much change in the system to expect in too short a time period.  But I think that embracing technology is ultimately the solution to the problem because like it or not, our kids are going to use digital technology to do their work.  We'd better show them how to do it well or risk creating a generation of cut and pasters.

Comments

[Steve]

Since I have only been out of high school for 4 years, I ran into this back in the day.

I used a very simple solution that worked for a few of the resources I had. I turned online resources into regular citations. I would take a paper or magazine article I found online and cite it as though I had read the article. Of course if you need to cite page numbers that becomes an issues.I successfully did that for a few different papers I had to write.

Its interesting that I have not ran into the "types of citations" rule in college yet. I guess professors in college have accepted the fact that papers are done at the last minute.

[Clinical Cases.blogspot]

Nothing wrong with the web only references. Personally, I like them much better.
In the medical field, where I work, online information is almost always very up-to-date, as compared to the textbooks, which lag 5-7 years behind the current knowledge. And you can always easily check the link, as opposed to dragging yourself to the library and flipping through these 2000+-pages volumes.

[rick gregory]

Depend on the field, but in most social sciences fields the vast majority of information in the field is not online. It WILL be, but it's not there now. I don't see any problem with supplementing from online sources, but to be prejudiced against source because they are offline makes no more sense than to reject sources because they are online.

On the specific issue of Wikipedia, I thought the post by danah made several good points.

[Ryan Murphy]

My school (Seattle Pacific University) had some classes that required 2-3 posts per week on the class bulletin boards. I really saw the students get involved more in the classes that had these online discussions. Not to mention that these classes also tended to have instructers that were willing to accept online bibliographies. However, they were also the first profs that would call you out if they didn't think you did a complete job. I think if a student wants to use online sources they he or she should be allowed to, it's the teachers job to question the work and make sure it holds up.

[Lenny Lenape]

The rule says 1 book and maybe a magazine. That's really not unreasonable. In fact, teaching the students to use all available resources is the only reasonable policy.

In offering the suggestion that technology is a better solution to the problem you seem to miss the important point thay there isn't a problem at all. The solution has been known for a long time.

Remove the heavy use of the word online from your paragraph and you've basically stated the obvious - a student should go through several revisions of his paper with the help of his peers and teachers to produce the best result.

Didn't we already knew this? Perhaps a blog like system would seem cooler to kids right now, but blogs may be as lame in a few years as personal home pages on Geocities are now.

[Sam]

Lenny's point above is strong: part of becoming a critical thinker is the process of revising and peer review. I don't know if online tools necessarily do a better job at this currently.

The school's policy seems quite reasonable and good preparation for higher education. I can't imagine a teacher having a problem with an online version of a journal, but a diversity of sources seems like good practice.

[BJZ]

Reminds me of an interesting story last year about a Univ Wash class dedicated to studying Google:

Registration required (free)
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?c=1&slug=google02&date=20040202&query=google

Quote from the news story: "It's very easy to go into Google and get an answer, but it's fairly easy to get a bad answer or mythological answer," Janes said. "Google represents an illusion of ease of search. It's easy to use, it's quick and it's free, but it's not the whole picture. Google as a tool is only as good as it's used."

Got me thinking back to the hundreds of hours I spent in dusty library stacks long before libraries became little more than banks of computers. Wonder if anyone any more appreciates the romance of discovery amid the crumbling pages of old books. My own kids are great readers, but they depend on the Web to do research for homework and term papers. True research may be endangered by the tools we use to make the job easier.

[Brendon J. Wilson]

Well, if copying is a problem, then using something like turnitin.com is a possible solution - ironically, it works better at catching plagiarism with papers who source from online content, as turnitin.com scours the web for content. (My MBA program used this solution to solve this exact problem)

[Pete]

Why don't you have your daughter check out the local library's web site? You would be amazed at the amount of "books" that are now on-line in reference databases that your tax dollars pay for. Pull an article from a reference database, and you'll find the same thing in the print copy of the book. Combine those reference articles with the latest periodicals provided in those databases, and you've got an entire package of works from which to cite. Granted, I work for a company that sells reference databases to libraries, but the fact remains. Libraries may not be the most skilled when it comes to marketing and letting people know what resources they provide, but they've got the goods when it comes to info that will be accepted by teachers and profs.

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