The Internet brings information on any topic to a student’s fingertips in a matter of seconds. However, for college-level academic work, a Google search or Wikipedia entry will probably elicit a less positive reaction from a professor than an old-fashioned primary source or peer-reviewed journal article.
Of 2,316 faculty members at colleges and universities surveyed nationwide in a 2004 study by Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Camille Johnson-Yale, a graduate student in communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 42 percent said they had seen a decline in the quality of student work since the dawn of the Internet, while 22 percent said they had seen an improvement.
Barbara Jenkins, head of reference and research services at the Knight Library, said that informal Internet sources have appropriate uses but are generally not adequate for college-level assignments.
“Sometimes the Web might be useful, but most of the time faculty are looking for something more scholarly,” Jenkins said.
One trap that students who rely exclusively on the Internet for research may fall into is citing information from Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), which describes itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
While Wikipedia provides information on numerous topics in 204 different languages – the English version alone has 722,298 articles – the transmutability of the articles poses inherent citation difficulties.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in an e-mail that volunteers monitor and edit Wikipedia entries, and that their work includes fact-checking and proof-reading.
“Wikipedia is an effort to create a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia to be distributed to every single person on the planet in their own language,” Wales wrote. “We strive to be comprehensive, accurate and neutral.”
The primary users of Wikipedia are adults, college students and advanced high school students, Wales said. However, not even Wales advocates using Wikipedia as the final word for a term paper.
“Just because Wikipedia is better than Encyclopedia Britannica in many areas, it is still not the sort of source that college students should be citing,” Wales wrote in the e-mail. “Just as they should not cite a traditional encyclopedia, they should not cite Wikipedia, either. This is not what an encyclopedia is for. An encyclopedia should be used as a broad starting point for further research.”
Jenkins said she has seen faculty members respond to students’ use of informal Internet sources by assigning complex, analytical projects that can’t easily be lifted from one Web site and by making assignments more clear. She said that some faculty members, especially in the School of Journalism and Communication, require students to write about their sources. Other teachers rely on their intuition to catch problems.
“I think a lot of them have a sense of when students are using appropriate sources,” Jenkins said.
Students’ use of inappropriate sources may be an issue of ignorance rather than deliberate disobedience.
“The real issue comes down to: How sophisticated are students at evaluating information on the Web?” Jenkins said.
Jenkins said that juniors and seniors tend to be more adept at this skill than incoming students.
“It’s not something that’s really taught at high schools,” she said.
Jenkins encourages students who need help with research projects to contact a librarian.
“We can get people on track in five to 10 minutes, when they would flounder around on the ‘net for hours and hours,” Jenkins said.
The library also offers a one-credit course each term, LIB 101, on research methods and evaluating information and has numerous informational articles on its Web site, libweb.uoregon.edu.
Students may soon be able to communicate directly with librarians online for little more effort than a Google search. University librarians are currently looking for an instant message service to offer quick online assistance, Jenkins said.
A pilot instant message service the library tested last spring proved too clunky for continued use, but Jenkins said librarians are still convinced that a fast and easy way to contact students is needed.
The library plans to publicize contact information for this service when it becomes operational.
