Copy, paste but read as well
Now that research (for secondary school students) seems to involve mastery of copy/paste from a web page, there are some upset educators in the house. To be fair, in my day Encyclopedia Britannica was used in a similar way; after you’d handcopied several pages of microprint, there was an even chance that learning took place despite your best intentions. Now, the action has become mechanical, and the absorption rate of raw knowledge is much lower (this has not yet been confirmed by independent study OR the editorial staff of EB).
The flaw in execution by some students is a belief that their teacher is unable to use a search engine and remains unfamiliar with any skill requiring keyboard shortcuts. Not so, soldier. Teachers are as quick as any of you to find labour-saving skills. How else do you think they mark all those assignments in the few hours of allotted time? Do you also believe that the guy in the red suit visits EVERY home in a single night?
The short term solution involves training in the art of the citation, but this is a panacea. We also have to find a way to entice our students into actually reading the content. I’ve heard that some educators require oral reports, but this just rewards the eloquent. And we know the eventual career pool of the extemporaneous speaker; teacher or politician. One barely paid, the other barely (fill in the blank, without using Google).
As the United States moves towards even greater copyright repression, it’s time the students figured out how to paraphrase, just like we had to do in the “good old days”.
