November 17, 2008
Internet Research
For today´s week, I had to work myself through the virtual session “Internet Research”.
In my opinion, the most important criteria out of this section is up first in the list, namely E-research. It contrastively shows the advantages and disadvantages of it. Just to name a few: advantages: easy access, fast, global range, cheap; disadvantages: valid information?, plagiarism-encouragement, ads/spam. On my mind, these points show the dilemma we are currently in as teacher (a.k.a. motivators) – the major time problem. Along with the Zentralabitur, students spend more and more time online to do research. One can say that “wikipedia is doing their homework”. Students, thus, just filter out the most relevant information they need to catch a glimpse into the topic. The internet is, of course, useful to get information in a very quick way, but this information might not be valid/correct (i. e. wikipedia). To get books out of a library is, hence, a much better way when working professionally with a topic, due to the verified authors of the certain book. The better living standards have just proven again that students are encouraged to be lazy since they have the opportunities. It is therefore the teacher´s job to motivate students to lend a book, so they can become much more independent and competent.
In respect to the other (not really minor) points, I believe that teachers should be well-informed when it comes to researching properly since this will become more and more popular (books made of pages to e-books, Project Gutenberg, f. e.) and we have to familiarize ourselves with it, in order to keep up with the environment we live in. I also think that it is difficult to do a “good” internet research because there are so many things, one has to look out for (i. e. is there an author? is there an url? when was the article published? is the article to specific/to general? etc.). Also the use of corpora (BNC, f. e.) or dictionaries (dict.cc, leo.org, etc.) and quoting correctly, deciding on a teaching method (i. e. guided, half-guided, free research) have to be taken into account by a teacher a long time beforehand.
Featured Article #4 « Anna Maria Gallus’ Weblog said,
November 18, 2008 at 8:47 am
[...] Week #3 Featured Article #4 November 18, 2008 The featured article this week is by Maximilan Mogk. He included an interesting comic that has also been mentioned by some others, take a look at [...]
Sophie Härtel said,
November 18, 2008 at 9:27 am
Hi Maximillian,
! Me, too, I think we as future teachers should encourage students to read books from time to time when doing research. But, of course, just as with internet research, we have to show our students how to do that. Although it might sound trivial, we should make sure our students know what an encyclopedia is and how research in a library works…
I really enjoyed reading your post on internet research, and I think the comic says it all
Sophie
Christin Böttner said,
November 20, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Hi Maximilian,
yes, you’re right: Our blog entries are quite similar!
Thus, there’s not much I can add or criticize here… I can just say that I enjoyed reading your entry.
But I have one question: How did you get this comic? I also wanted to put it on my page but I always found the note that I have to pay for it when using it…?!
Regards,
Christin