I read an interesting post from Andy Chiles about a ‘lecturer banning students from using google and wikipedia“.

Anyone who has been a student in the wiki age, knows that citing wikipedia (or any non-authoritative work) is a tabu.

Professor Tara Brabazon, after noticing that student research mostly relies on the first results in a search query, said:

Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.

Additionally, the professor commented:

I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both, not one or the other, not a cheap solution.

I find it to be a very interesting subject, for two reasons:

• The lecturer supports that the students do not practice their interpretative skills, when citing the results of search engines. So what students do is just reconstruct the online sources. But couldn’t they do the same with analog books?

• The lecture doesn’t say anything about the trustworthiness of the sources. After the debate raised by the new Google Knol platform, I’m really curious if authoritative articles are also banned, or is it just collaborative works that are considered superficial.

But all in all, i find her remarks correct.

• She bans digital information, so that the students will also learn the analog process.

I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both, not one or the other, not a cheap solution.

It is a process, that I find necessary in any type of research. It just widens the field of research and opinions.

• Using only websites and search engine results as a reference to a work, will probably provide an incomplete view of a subject.
  It is also a method, that most students are very well accustomed to. It’s time to try something new.

But I disagree with the view, that digitisation is to blame for students not using their brain anymore. If indeed students don’t use their brain, the problem is bad use of digitisation. The web provides a huge variety of resources and discussions. In fact the (social) web is a much more interactive medium than any book. If interaction is used correctly, it has the potential to provide better results than any single book.

Do you find the professor’s methodology of banning online resources productive? Should students be allowed to use online information?