Academic banning of Google and Wikipedia misguided. I came across a news item this morning reporting that a lecturer in the UK has banned her students from using Google and Wikipedia for their assignments. While railing against the variable quality of resources available on the Web is popular in academic circles, calls to restrict usage of the web in higher education are misguided and, in my opinion, do a great disservice to students.

Scott Berkun notes that the article misrepresents the professor's (Tara Brabazon) actual practice and intentions. She is, in fact, trying to teach her students information literacy (see below). However, her initial response, as part of her attempt to motivate students to learn how to conduct proper research, is to ban Google and Wikipedia to force students to break their current information retrieval habits and to learn new ways of researching their papers. This will certainly get their attention, but I'm not sure it is the best approach.

When assessing a student's work, the quality of the sources on which they have based their work (and, of course, properly cited as such) have or should have some impact on the overall assessment given to the student's work. Students need to learn the importance of leveraging the work of others to create new knowledge: new for themselves and, if they continue their studies and research, new for their field. They have to learn how to assess the relative quality of resources, and specifically to learn what constitutes a valid resource in their field of study.

In presenting assignments, professors should specify what kinds of works are acceptable and which are not. The acceptability of a resource should be based on its intellectual content, and not on the media with which it is delivered, nor the tool or process by which it is located. As I suggested earlier, it has become popular to use the web as a shorthand way of dismissing a whole category of resources: if its on the web, it isn't appropriate for citation in a university paper.

Back in the 1990's, this assumption would have been a safe one to make. Chances are that a web page or web site referenced by a student wouldn't have met the criteria for an acceptable resource. Today, that same assumption is far less likely to be accurate. Are books no longer acceptable once they are digitized? The trend in academic libraries towards e-journals, and any of these e-journals are or will be indexed by Google and other search engines. Will they still be considered appropriate resources? What about the 3000 or so journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which have no paper manifestation. Are they valid academic resources?

(I'm accepting, for the moment, the assumption that acceptable knowledge resides primarily in peer-reviewed journals and in books.)

It is also worth noting that almost all of the catalogues, indexes, and databases available to students to locate academic materials are available through the Web. Most of these are only available on university networks or by some other means of authentication, but they are still on the Web. Especially from the perspective of a student who spends the majority of their time access the Web via a university network, for them, access to these resources are seemless from the rest of their surfing. They are just part of the Web.

As for Wikipedia, I would agree that, for a variety of reasons, it is probably not a proper source for an academic work. Many professors would not accept an encyclopedia entry as a citation in a paper, regardless of which encyclopedia it came from. Some might accept it as a source of a definition, perhaps, but in those cases, it would have to be an encyclopedia recognized in that field. Wikipedia, in a general sense, wouldn't make the grade.

However, I do believe that Wikipedia, like any other encyclopedia, can be a useful resource for students, especially when they are starting their research. Wikipedia can help them to get a general idea of the structure of their topic, maybe come up with some keywords and phrases that can be used to formulate their initial search strategies. Students who base an entire paper on Wikipedia articles should get the same grade as if they had based their paper on articles from Encyclopedia Britannica (that is to say, a poor grade).

If the situation has gotten to the point, as the initial article suggests, that students are not able to find proper sources for their papers, then that is because they are not being taught how to do so. They are also not being properly motivated to learn how to do so. How to motivate them? Simple: fail papers that are not properly sourced. Students are experts at doing the minimum amount of work necessary to get the grade they want. If they can get away with a poorly sourced and cited paper, they will, and do. The learning opportunities and the motivation needed to learn are entirely in the hands of faculty. If faculty aren't happy with the situation, they have it in their power to change it. Yes, they will get pushback from students, parents, and administration as their class averages drop. But, inevitably, students will learn, and will do proper academic work.

Academics who ban students from using the web, Google, Wikipedia, or similar resources are doing those students a grave disservice. Students need to learn how to assess the relevance and authority of information sources independent of their media. They need to learn what constitutes an authoritative source, in academia and especially in their field of study. They need to learn how to navigate the complexities and ambiguities of the information at their disposal. Teaching them an oversimplified model for assessing information resources, while potentially effective at getting them to change their habits, does little to develop the skills they need to be successful in their studies and their future careers.