Posted on 06/11/2006 8:07:04 PM PDT by SamAdams76
this is for real, I know I had way underestimated the impact of the internet for modern students until I realized all the work I was doing putting together an outline for my sister was available from wikipedia in a few clicks.
Research projects are never going to be the same.
A year later, it has yet to be touched. .."
I can see that! Google and the net in general is too powerful to overlook. The Net is a new starting point for research where in older days the encyclopedia and the article bibliography was one place to begin.
It is progress.
Agreed. However, you need to be able to discern the BS when using the Internet.
I still have a personal research library at my fingertips.
Our local library looks like a Blockbuster store.Last week out of eight people checking out articles I was the only one with books.
This has been a growing trend for a long time, and I don't think 'Google' should be credited with it. Altavista, yahoo and a variety of other search engines were in common use long before google came along.
One thing that has changed is acceptance of personal searches. I had a date in 1998 who altavistaed me, and I had altavistaed her, before we met. Back then people got kind of freaked out if you admitted you searched their name online. Now it's common place and expected. She gained points in my book for having done that.
The new Santa Monica Google offices are next door to the brand new Santa Monica Library. Coincidence?
I do some work in a technical library. I suspect that eventually most of the collection will be digitized. A huge number of journals are already online and searchable, and the number of materials like this are only going to go up.
And it makes sense. I love to do research, but given a choice between slogging through hard copy or using a searchable copy, I prefer to do the critical referencing via computer.
For certain types of work, there still aren't enough quality materials available, but that is changing by leaps and bounds.
This can, though, lead to rather shallow digesting of information.
And I think of the older days, where I used to pour through journal articles looking at the footnotes to try to discover more sources worth looking at...and painstakingly going through indexes looking for key works...
The future belongs to database utilizing. And to database creation.
When you discover that your mortgage balance is public info that anyone can get, well that makes the notion of a library irrelative.
Here in Broward County Florida the libraries have lots and lots of computers. Some people go on line and some computers are used by school children for hours to play games.
#2 Our libraries have very good VHS and DVD collections. People are checking them out as much as books. Video stores have stiff competition from public libraries and it's free from the library
#3 Mothers with children learning how to read checking out 10 books at a time for them. This is a good trend
#4 Books are much easier to read than computer screens. The tendency is to speed read and skim when reading text on computer monitors. But for finding reading absorbing short bursts of information the internet is incomparable
Our high school library is becoming the research location: It has numerous computers for research. I'm not a library purist: Wherever you can find out the info, go there. The kids just need to be taught how to weigh the accuracy of that which they find: THIS IS A GOOD LESSON FOR LIFE.
I think computers are flatly amazing. It's like having all of the libraries in your own kitchen/wherever.
Hard copy will always be treasured...at least, by this bibliophile!
You just have to cross check. That was true before.
You're right about that. Back in the early and mid-80's at the University of Minnesota, most of my research was done in the reference area of Wilson Library.
A few years back, I went back to get my degree and found that I could achieve a lot of what I was looking for by using Internet searches.
I didn't rely on the Internet alone (and no one should) - but I said to myself at least a few times "Cripes, I wish the Internet were around back when I was first at college!".
I agree.
Earlier this year, I was asked to be a judge for a History fair at a middle school in Minneapolis.
A lot of kids used the Internet ONLY for their research. I asked these kids if they used other sources (books, magazines, etc) and more often that not they said "No, I used Wikipedia only". I usually knocked them down a few points if they didn't have a diversity of sources.
Wikipedia can be a decent source - depending on the subject. But too many kids were taking what I believed was the easy way out.
YES SIR.
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