Brighton professor bans Google

@jim

Alas I mumbled and missed my mark but my aim was to suggest that it was less the apples, or the orchards, or the wild grown forests, but more the capability of a person to find good apples in either (and possibly better apples for having access to both) - given the intellectual tools to differentiate.

To get right away from the whole clumsy metaphor, in the years just prior to the "democratization of knowledge" through the rise of the Interweb, a class I was in was given the task of doing some sort of research using magazines and trade publications as source material. There were a number of purposes to this but the pertinent one was to develop skills and techniques in determining the veracity of material in cheaply produced printed publications.

To apply lightning to the mangled corpse of the original metaphor, someone limited to the pristine orchard misses out on the "thunderbolt from the blue" information sources - the hidden gems; the unexpected goldmine; the revolutionary thought. The person limited to the wilderness misses out on the safe harbour of known, reliable, sources - unable to even use them a model in their search for information because they just dont know how. The person who isnt artificially constrained to only access one pool of information or the other (screw the damned metaphor!), and who is also equipped with the tools to make valid discerning judgements is at an advantage over the other two. At the end of the day it is really the training - the learned ability to choose good information sources and use poor sources only to the limit of their reliability - that is most important..

So, basically what others have been saying only more cryptically so. Thank heavens for contrived anonymity

Cheers

Don’t devalue arts degrees!

Don’t devalue arts degrees because of the dubious courses being developed and run by the new universities. This news is really more about the state of academic study in the UK, than it is about ‘New Media’. The above comments by Andy on wikipedia/google providing a *starting point* are apposite, too often in ‘ology’ courses this starting point is the finishing point also.

The detail that shocked me was that the ‘Academic’ (quotation marks justified, I think) “provides her students with a reading list, of books, and expects their work to reference those works”. Even in the first year that reading point should be a guide, the second point in collecting and generating ideas and information. These universities are producing students who can only work from either; easy to access, but inferior, material, or highly prescribed sources.

Lecture

I'd hate to be teaching students who think that they can accomplish their research via Google and Wikipedia, but it's hard not read the lecture title as "Provocations from a Medicated Sage."

@Paul M

Have you tried reading the article yourself? Try the very first sentence...

"The professor of media studies at the University of Brighton has had enough of students turning in "banal and mediocre work" and decided that Google and Wikipedia must go."

Google and Wikipedia, not just Wiki.

Try the second paragraph:

"To achieve this she has, reportedly, banned her students using _search engines_ and Wikipedia."

Now I did notice earlier comments about citations, but please tell me how the *bleep* does someone cite Google? Google is a search engine not a library (yet).

If your post is an example of being "exposed to such a rigorous academic environment" then I would rather stick with my ExamCram certs :p

college students using any encyclopedia??

At university level, no encyclopedia is a citable source. At that level, they should be using scholarly information, i.e. grown-up books. Nothing on the web will give you the depth of research, wisdom, and interwoven understanding of Europe circa 1610 as anything by, say, J H Elliott or G Parker. Elliott's book on Olivares is matched in depth, breadth and knowledge by NOTHING on the internet. But then, my background is medieval history, and you need to know medieval latin as well as history of that period and preceding periods to be able to understand the 'why' of what was going on in, say, 1294, and to write anything intelligent about it.

Media Studies, now that's quite a different matter.

Most universities do this

Most professors do not allow this. Google and Wikipedia only encourage shallow fact finding.

Smart students will still use them

The point being that smart students won't be *caught* using them. If your report reads like copypasta from prominent websites you're got for breaking the web rule. If it reads like original work with proper references including those she handed out wheee!

@steve

Yes physics (but ++ years ago). Sure there will never be that many jobs in physics, but it is regarded as an attractive degree by other recuruiters (particularly in finance) who might have previously preferred more generalist courses.

Ms?

Just wondering why you refer to her as "Ms" Brabazon and not "Professor"?

Good on her

I would go further and ban any form of computer based research and for a very good reason. Cut & Paste. It's been touched on in the sense of cheating but that aside the simple action of cutting and pasting doesn't get any of the information in your head. It goes straight from screen to document. The good old fashioned method of reading, taking notes then putting things in your own words has the advantage that at least some brain activity is needed and maybe a tiny bit of what passes by there may decide to stay for later recall.

Internet vs Book research

Universities and such don't really teach real life skills required for the workforce, and that is to be prompt, getting information quickly, and efficiently. instead, they insist students take hours upon hours researching ONE item. If you were to do that in the workforce, you'd get fired for being tardy on your research data.

Universities and other educational institutes should NOT impose bans, but rather indicate the REAL repercussions of using the potentially iffy source (i.e. you can use $website, but your work will only be seen as credible as the source). Banning only makes things worse as far as this is concerned as it prevents people from using available resources in their educational work.

As it seems, Universities are bubble-wrapping students into not thinking on their own and mindlessly writing essays that are to a very specific wordlength and to a very specific type style. in doing this, they are actually piping out students who know alot of the subject at hand, but no real practical application in the real world to present it to employers, thus no employer would in their right mind hire them as said in a few of the posts stated previously.

Oh dear

1) -ology degrees are looked down upon? I don't think my lady will be very happy to find her biology degree from a "proper" university counts for naught.

2) Citing Wikipedia is just asking to be ridiculed.

3) There's nothing wrong with trying to find your own references per se. However, the vast, vast majority of freshers have *never* done proper research before. They get given a text book in class and that is their world. Throwing them in at the deep end is therefore a bad idea. You may as well give a learner driver their first lesson on the M25 at 8am on a Monday morning. Yes, they need those traffic dodging skills one day, but let's start off nice and simple eh?

By giving them texts that you have checked you can teach them how to use them properly and see that they are actually doing it in their papers. Once they have that down pat *then* they can start to find their own stuff.

4) Books *are* better than the internet. The main and most obvious reason is that books cost money to print, and nobody will buy your book if it's filled with inaccurate prattle.

I don't understand how ppl can be complaining about this. If the story was "Brighton Uni Media Studies course accepts Wikipedia as a quotable source" there'd be uproar (rightly so) that such courses count for bugger all and the UK education system is circling the drain etc.

So if the Internet has been lying to me...

...what the hell is my philtrum really called?

Books can win...

I spent about a week googling for various information that I needed for a project that included some HVAC design concepts. I didn't exactly get far. I did, however get the names of a few books that might help. After 20 minutes of purposeful meandering through L-space (being able to see nothing but tall, narrow rows of books is so disorienting...) I had a table full of all the information that I could possibly want. Plus quite a bit more.

Plus I like the fact that books are a hell of a lot easier to manipulate (except for grepping...) - I can lay a whole table of them out, vs a monitor of text, I can add bookmarks that I can access by a simple reach, I can hold my finger(s) in 2 or 3 pages and quickly flip back and forth, and I can hurl them at project members that are getting off topic. I find that most PDF readers / ebook readers / web browsers lack most of that functionality.

@Ian: I prefer degrees that end in "Engineering." Most of those end up being pretty useful worthy of payment. Then again there are quite a few degrees with no ending at all that are entirely useless too... Marketing, Communications, Pre Law, Dance, and Studio Art, to name a few. Who pays money to go to a 4 year institution to end up with a nice paper which says 'Dance' on it.

Props to the Prof

Congrats to this Professor for bringing down the ban hammer on Google and Wikipedia. I work in an IT department in a University and you can tell / read the difference between people who got their material off the internet and the people who went to the library, or did a case study or two themselves in order to research a project. The ones who do Google and Wikipedia, their reports feel like they've only gotten the "Cliffnotes" version of the whatever topic they are researching and the rest just feels like BS or fluff. The students that take the time to get the books and do the hands on research, you readily see that the person is written in words that only the individual student would use. The information just seems to have been "digested" more. At least thats from what I've seen.

Is she really called Tara Brabazon?

As in Lord Brabazon of Tara, instigator of the Bristol Brabazon aircraft:

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Brabazon)

@Futaihikage

As far as I can tell, you're seeing lousy papers and attributing them to students who used teh intertubes, and seeing good papers and attributing them to students who did not.

Hardly brilliant reasoning for such a scholar as you.

A hottie?

Did any of you hear her on the radio? I did and - bit strident, I felt. Ignoring her advice, I Googled her. Never mind her intellect or academic excellence - she looks hot. And, after all, looking attractive to sad ageing men in IT is what every feminist aspires to, innit ;)

This is not news!

Nice to see Brighton Polytechnic *cough* I mean University is coming in line with what we at traditional universities have always specified anyway.

Sources absolutely have to be peer reviewed to prove that they are true knowledge to the best of the ability of the author or researcher. Although I love Wikis and search engines and feel that they are a valued day-to -day resource, they have no place in academic work.

Any amateur, liar or charlatan can post any (mis)information they like on the net, and it is a matter of course in the university that I work at that web links are rejected as a form of research for course work. I am surprised that Brighton Uni ever accepted them in the first place.

Wikipedia versus Academia: a false dilemma

As for citing Wikepedia, it's like citing a cloud formation; people can't always go back and examine what you cited because it is subject to change at any time. When you cite a book with a certain ISBN published by a certain publisher in a certain edition, you have a citeable resource that can be checked if desired. Even though editions sell out and books may even go out of print, there is at least the ideal of a static artifact of definite content, to which Wikipedia simply does not aspire. This in itself is not a dig against Wikipedia, it's just a fact of academic life: citations need to be traceable to something reasonably permanent, and Wikipedia doesn't fit the mold.

That said, there is a more important problem with students doing research via Wikipedia or even a conventional dead tree encyclopedia for that matter: it deprives the student of real exploration and the chance to create.

Some time ago I returned to college as a 33 year-old undergraduate and brought to my writing the odd gem from outside reading in Structural Linguistics, Literary Theory, Freud, MacLuhan etc. Example: My taste for deconstruction of text to discover hidden assumptions and agendas was tremendously boosted by running across the following marxist dictum in a Lit Crit book: "Every power structure secretes an ideology to make the status quo seem so normal as to nullify the possibility of criticism." Although there was little fun to be had tormenting my professors with run-of-the-mill Marxist deconstruction, this tipped me off that examining the origins and possible motivations for a text is often more useful than pretending that the text is a freestanding, autonomous artifact as some poetry critics would have it. With this and other little gems in the back of my mind, I was able to dredge things out of the assigned reading that my best profs had never considered, and they were delighted.

This is not the kind of thing you'll get from Wikipedia or any other online tool. You have to explore--that is, read widely--on your own, and in your explorations you'll collect useful (or at least interesting) ideas that you (and not Wikipedia) will be able to compare, contrast and highlight with threads in the reading material assigned by the teacher. And it will be truly representative of you, though you may take your knocks in defending your creation.

So, the real criticism of Wikipedia is that although it may point out some interesting avenues to explore, it is not the exploration itself. The real exploration is your encounter with the actual source material (not abstracts or commentaries) and your collecting of bright and shiny ideas that may come in handy at some point.

My criterion for distinguishing an idea that will probably be useful later is if it provokes one of the following subvocalizations: "Wow!", "Interesting!", "Cool!" or "I wish I had said that!". Out comes the highlighter, I may jot down a more extended comment on it, and I rarely throw away a book that has a lot of highlighting and notes in it. When it came time to put together a paper for the teacher, I just pillaged my storehouse of highlights and notes and the papers practically wrote themselves. It takes a few years to accumulate a usable stock of stimulating ideas, but if you start in high school you'll have a chance at writing something really interesting at the college level.

In summary, Wikipedia is a tool, but it's not acceptable as an authoritative source of citations by its very nature. The exploration of real source material lies elsewhere, and normal individual variation in what gets explored is what will put an individual's stamp on his or her subsequent writing.

My Two Cents.

A couple of thoughts on reading these messages:

@ Robert Long

>There's almost no information on the Web so it's not a big deal.

>Seriously. People who think the web is a research tool are the ones

>who are out of touch.

I must be out of touch then. I'm studying Computer Science at the mo, so by the

reckoning of some here it's a "proper" degree. I have found information on the 'Net, and used it for projects which have scored quite well.

@ Risky

>This is another reason why employers will increasingly value (and pay for)

> hard science degrees where wikipedia can't really help much.

I was studying Computer Systems Architecture recently, and wished to find out more about chip architecture, so I started with Wikipedia using the phrase CPU.

This rather quickly lead me to information about pipelines, a method used for speeding up throughput. Having not read much about this yet I pasted the header for the page into Google on a new tab.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Instruction+pipeline&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

This is the page it sent me to.

The fifth entry on this page is for "stanford.edu" Yep, Stanford University.

O.K. so the first two hits went back to Wikipedia, the third to a management

strategies company, but hits four and five were universities.

My point is that Wikipedia is not the destination when researching, but it can

be quite handy as a first step to find other connected areas for further study.

@ Keith T

>Or was she put off when she was looking for info on Paris -- I got to page

>four on Google before finding anything about Greek mythology.

Understandable. But if you were looking for Greek mythology in a library

would you check the book list for anything that mentioned Paris and go to

every book in order until you found the information you sought?

I would pass on anything in the travel section, or foreign languages etc.

and add the term "Greek mythology" to my initial search. The same thing

works in Google.

Albeit the first link is one for Wikipedia, but all five of the top links are

pertinent.

Both Google and Wikipedia are useful, but not the end point of my research.

Jim.

Google. Last time I got the info i needed in the first 5 hits.

1999 IIRC.......

The Brabazon has been scrapped.

Irony, irony. Using Google to research a piece about books, I come across this story about Prof Brabazon, who wants her students only to read the printed word, and forget the net.

So Ms Brabazon rails against the present and wants people to use yesterday's technology.

At least she is aptly named. The Bristol Brabazon was a wonderful piece of British engineering. Airliner prototype. Wonderfully luxurious. Eight engines. Only one problem. They were attached to propellers. And there was this thing called the jet engine...

The Bristol Brabazon was scrapped. The Brighton Brabazon should be too.

PS. I'm reading a good book at present. I found it by reading reviews. I found the reviews by searching Google. Obliquely. Using terms unconnected with the title of the book.

Oblique connections, lateral thinking heteroglossia good. Monologic linear narrative bad.