When students write essays requiring research, in the age of Wikipedia and other online resources, I worry a little, not so much about the quality of the sources themselves (that has always varied, even in the day of hardcopy sources), but about the quality or outright dearth of note taking that often accompanies the writing of research papers.
Staring at a blank screen the night before the research paper was due—this was the dilemma faced by my upper-level science students. The paper, the product of their independent research projects, is an important part of our curriculum and one component of our assessment of their scientific writing skills.
Most academics consider Wikipedia the enemy and so forbid their students from using Wikipedia for research. But here’s a secret that they don’t want you to know—we all use Wikipedia, including those academics.
Librarians as partners is a relationship that may not have occurred to you, but as librarians we think it’s one you ought to explore. Librarians are qualified to help you with pedagogical issues that go way beyond how to find a book or search a database.
Take the plethora of information available online, add the ease of which students can cut-and-paste material, throw in lots of pressure to get good grades, and plagiarism becomes an appealing option to almost any student.
When you assign your students to write a paper, do they know where to start? Upperclassmen surely do, but what about freshmen? Left to their own devices, they’ll likely turn to Google and Wikipedia as their main research tools, and may never even set foot in the library if they can help it.
