2008 Woodie Awards
This is my last column
Technophile
Jonathan Harrop
Issue date: 4/23/08 Section: Life & Style
Many of you will be quite disappointed, I'm sure, but I bet there's just as many who really don't care. Nevertheless, I sincerely hope there's no one who's really glad.
I've wrestled with the topic of my last column for a while and, while in a futile quest to find academic sources on Lexis-Nexus, it hit me. Here we are in an age of information, paying technology fees to the university to have all this neat stuff, and I can't write "Everyone, Everywhere. The Internet Worldwide, c.1988-2008" on my Works Cited page.
It's a lot easier to bookmark a link to a Web browser than to have stacks of books lying around.
The Internet contains an almost infinite number of resources on any one topic. Legal and illegal. Moral and immoral. Appropriate and inappropriate. It's all there, but for some reason I have to go and actually find a book to back up my Web resources.
Yes, I saw "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" on The Disney Channel as a child, and I know that Rome didn't fall in 1979 A.D. There's a lot of crap out there and a lot of wrong information, but a large part of writing a paper is sorting the wheat from the chaff and learning to do so effectively.
Using one source is stupid. Using two, only slightly less so. Do the research. Learn what you need to learn and use other sources to build your paper. Special mention here must go to Project Gutenberg and Google Books for allowing background reading without having to venture to the library in the spring deluge.
I have written an entire paper using the Internet, without aid from any source involving paper. I did it at home, in class and even at work. I used parenthetical citations and updated my bibliography as I wrote.
I could not have done this with hard copy sources.
Some of it, I suspect, is the partially legitimate fear of teachers and professors of the copy-and-paste-o-philes. I tried it once when I was in the fifth grade. I wrote something so out of character and above my writing level that my teacher just told me no.
I've wrestled with the topic of my last column for a while and, while in a futile quest to find academic sources on Lexis-Nexus, it hit me. Here we are in an age of information, paying technology fees to the university to have all this neat stuff, and I can't write "Everyone, Everywhere. The Internet Worldwide, c.1988-2008" on my Works Cited page.
It's a lot easier to bookmark a link to a Web browser than to have stacks of books lying around.
The Internet contains an almost infinite number of resources on any one topic. Legal and illegal. Moral and immoral. Appropriate and inappropriate. It's all there, but for some reason I have to go and actually find a book to back up my Web resources.
Yes, I saw "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" on The Disney Channel as a child, and I know that Rome didn't fall in 1979 A.D. There's a lot of crap out there and a lot of wrong information, but a large part of writing a paper is sorting the wheat from the chaff and learning to do so effectively.
Using one source is stupid. Using two, only slightly less so. Do the research. Learn what you need to learn and use other sources to build your paper. Special mention here must go to Project Gutenberg and Google Books for allowing background reading without having to venture to the library in the spring deluge.
I have written an entire paper using the Internet, without aid from any source involving paper. I did it at home, in class and even at work. I used parenthetical citations and updated my bibliography as I wrote.
I could not have done this with hard copy sources.
Some of it, I suspect, is the partially legitimate fear of teachers and professors of the copy-and-paste-o-philes. I tried it once when I was in the fifth grade. I wrote something so out of character and above my writing level that my teacher just told me no.
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