Rothenberg's Criticisms of Using the Web for Research
In How the Web Destroys the Quality of Students' Research Papers, David Rothenberg laments the use of the Web as a tool for doing research and asserts that it has lowered the quality of their research papers.
Here are Rothenberg's Criticisms of Students' Use of the WWW
1. -the bibliography cites no books, just articles or pointers to places on the Web
2. -a lot of the information on the Web is at least a few years old
3. -pictures and graphs that are inserted into the text look impressive but often bear little relation to the precise subject of the paper
4. -unattributed quotes in which one cannot tell who made the statement or in what context
5. -few references to careful, in-depth commentaries on the subject of the paper
6. -the Web makes research look too easy
7. -students' attention spans wane and their ability to reason for themselves declines
Richard Cummins, in a letter to the editor, writes in opposition to Rothenberg's essay on how the World Wide Web is destroying the quality of students' research papers. Cummins claims that Rothenberg gives the Web far too much power over our lives and consciousness. Using the Web as a metaphor, Cummins says that it us up to the student to become either the spider or the fly.
The amount of information or misinformation on the Web is so large, and Rothenberg says that is one of the problems when using it for research. It is easy to get hundreds of thousands of hits, but not so easy to find the gems in that haystack. Cummins seems to suggest that it is up to the student to figure out what is good information and how to create searches that will find it.
Cummins makes the point that there are as many rotten books and worthless journal articles in libraries as there are rotten sources on the Internet. Thus, the job of finding good information in the library is as daunting as finding it on the WWW.
Rothenberg wishes for his students to sit under a tree with a book and read it from cover to cover. To read a whole book while sitting under a tree suggests that the reader should have a tent, a cook stove and a supply of food. Rothenberg loses credibility in his argument with this suggestion. Cummins' letter to the editor opposing Rothenberg's arguments is more persuasive in my view.
368 words
I include the number of words in this blog entry because I asked students to write a similar journal entry in their newly-created blogs using 500 words. As soon as I began this assignment I realized that 500 words was too many. 250 to 300 words would have been better. Sorry class, for this mistake. Now I will look to see if any of them have written the assignment and how long their entry is.
One of my goals in this class is to help students improve their writing fluency, thus the emphasis on number of words written. We are dong ten-minute free-writing at the start of each class and counting the number of words. We will count the number of words in all our writing in this class. In this way, we will see what would be a reasonable goal for total words to be written in this semester-long course. 5,000? 10,000?
523 words. Whew! I made it with that piece on the end.