re: Homework, Plagiarism and Intellectual property in the 21st Century

Jonathan Noble — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:29:36 GMT

I must admit that when I saw the original story about the Google/Wikipedia ban, I was thinking exactly what you say about the search engine being the library catalogue.

To my mind two things have changed: 1) the library is just bigger now, and 2) you have to be more careful to ensure that what you're finding in the "library" is accurate. Where students used to go to the library, find a book with relevant text and quote/re-phrase bits, the fact that you now can't rely on all the sources which claim to be authoritative, encourages one to seek confirmation elsewhere. That is probably the important thing to teach.

I've always been of the opinion that students should be encouraged to make proper use of the resources that they would have available to them in the real world. A prime example being in the teaching of mathematics - there are some things that a genuinely useful to be able to work out in your head, but others that you would never realistically do without a computational tool. In those cases, what should be assessed is a student's ability to use that tool, not their ability to do it on paper, which they would most likely never do again. I think using Google is analogous to that.