The Internet: The death-knell of academia?

Recently, I read an article in which a college professor grumbles about the state of research papers he receives, blaming both “word processers” and the internet. He complains of students who cheat paper-length by adjusting margins or font size, list unattributed quotes or out-of-date sources. He feels that even those sources that are current are somehow suspect. He goes on to muse that he would like for his “university's computer system […] crash for a day, so that [he] could encourage them to go outside, sit under a tree, and read a really good book -- from start to finish.” It was this last sentence that particularly struck a nerve and made me want to track this guy down and smack him a good one. Who did he think he was?

The idea that students don’t go out and sit under a tree and read a really good book because of the internet is ludicrous. For one thing, there are many students who are not going to go and read a book for pleasure – under a tree or anywhere. And there are freaks like me who would love to go sit under a tree with a book. I would love to be able to go to a bookstore and pick-up a good book and read it for enjoyment in the middle of a semester. If anything, the ability to do research online has given me the extra time to – barely – read the novel a week required in most Lit classes, along with the novel-length reading from textbooks required each week from other classes. This on top of writing assignments and other research projects. I’m not afraid of homework. I actually enjoy the majority of it. I realize there is a lot of material to cover in a semester and it seems that no one ever gets to it all. But what winds up happening is a lot of professors assigning a lot of reading. The result being that the half the class who actually read the assignment (in half of the time they should have spent on it,) wind up comprehending only half the material. (The other half of the class winds up comprehending nothing because they didn’t do the reading at all.) Rather than concentrating on the quality of the student’s understanding, the schools focus on the quantity of material covered.

The other point in this article that bothered me was that the professor – like many others – feel that using the internet for research is, somehow, lazy or cheating. They somehow feel that research that is not done by spending hours in the library is not research at all. This, of course, is analogous to your parents telling you how they had to walk ten miles to school, or how they only had three channels on TV when they were your age. To be sure there are lazy and/or stupid students who don’t see why plagiarism is wrong, but I think they are in the minority.

The online educational community has policed itself and responded to the complaint of academics. Not that long ago, we were admonished to not use Google for research purposes, yet today we have “Google Scholar” – featuring thousands of scholarly articles from journals and other accepted sources – on the UNM research database. There was a time, to be sure, that I might have found myself in the library for the weekend, poring through stacks of books, walking all over hell and creation in search of a book that was not on the shelf. Or I might track down a book through InterLibrary Loan, and have to wait for it to arrive. Thanks to great online Research and Database Index at UNM, this information is at my fingertips anytime of the day or night. Recently there was a water-main break at Zimmerman library – shutting the place down. When it reopened, services were limited. But those of us off-campus, at home in the middle of the night didn’t even know. We were able to continue with our work.

The internet is here to stay. An obvious statement, but a point that professors need to take to heart. Rather than complain about what they deem to be sloppy study habits by students, they need to focus on how to teach students to better use computers as tools for learning, perhaps even by requiring a 100 level class that teaches students how to use all that the computer offer them in a legitimate and scholarly manner. But more than that, we, as students/consumers, need to demand our money’s worth from our education. We need to demand quality of information over quantity. We are in college, not just to learn, but to learn how to learn. There is no room for instructors who are egocentric, Luddite, or, in the case of more than a few I’ve encountered, feel that we can learn more from each other than they can teach us.

~ Rick Raab-Faber