Against the University of Google?
January 14, 2008
A professor at the University of Brighton has attracted some attention by declaring that her students are banned from using Google and other websites like Wikipedia in their research. Tara Brabazon (who is presumably also not a fan of Amazon’s Search Inside feature) is presenting a lecture this week entitled “Google is White Bread for the Mind” where she will argue that sites like Wikipedia are “creating an age of banality and mediocrity by providing consensual information and stifling debate.”
While one can rather easily see the danger in relying on constantly shifting and unaccountable Wikipedia pages as a source in an academic paper (although WP does provide a guide for researchers), it is a bit more peculiar to see Google being blacklisted. As commenters at the tech blog TechCrunch have noted, Google itself isn’t a source, but rather a tool for finding sources. As one who has used Google Scholar myself, I have found it to be quite useful, although students should still exercise caution in determining which sites and articles are trustworthy and which are not.
Entry Filed under: Education News. Tags: Google, technology, Wikipedia.
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1.
Against the University of&hellip | January 14, 2008 at 12:15 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
2.
twidox | January 15, 2008 at 7:51 am
Without wanting to do too much self advertising on this subject, but we are working on a solution to this problemin the form of twidox (www.twidox.com). The aim of Twidox is to create an online library of ‘quality’ documents which have been created and uploaded by our users; such as academics, researchers and non governmental agencies. Documents on the website will be accessible to all and will allow people to share their knowledge and help others in their work and research. This means documents will be quotable and students will be able to see the reading list from other people, allowing them to do even deeper research.
All the best,
Nicholas
3.
Week In Review « Th&hellip | January 18, 2008 at 3:28 pm
[...] We learned that Wikipedia (obviously) and Google (more surprisingly) are not fit for academic research. [...]