On 5/31/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/1/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The school deserves credit for allowing the kids to use Wikipedia. I hope the message gets back to them.
A friend of mine's 13 year old sister uses it so frequently, I don't think she even bothers using any other sources for the myriad of pointless "research projects" she's required to write. I've explained to her the dangers of taking Wikipedia at face value, and the sheer lunacy of attempting to plagiarise it. But mostly I mock her laziness
- she's mature enough to know better.
I have to say though, I was a little bit touched when she plagiarised some text I wrote at [[Paris]]. An extremely indirect, 3rd-millennium way of doing someone else's homework for them. If you actually think about the technology that was required for that to happen, well, it's rather mindblowing really.
Steve
Yeah, the technology is mind-blowing, but still, the plagiarism is bothersome.
When we were growing up and writing research papers we had to read a book on the subject and orally summarize what we'd read before we could begin writing or doing more research. I realize now this was partly my parents' way of preventing plagiarism, but it certainly showed me the limits of the encyclopedia articles I read. My nieces are required to do pretty much the same thing, though less formally (I was home-schooled, they go to public schools). They read a book on the subject in addition to getting information off the web, but they are always required to read a book on the subject and discuss what they read with other family members.
KP