A Double-Edged Sword

I have come to the point in the semester where I begin to teach research. I began today by asking my students where they go when they want information. The answer-Google and Wikipedia. I'm never surprised by this, but it does make me cringe. Breaking students of this habit is difficult, if not impossible. There are ways to prevent this, by requiring a certain number of scholary journals, books, etc. for a particular assignment, but it can be difficult to traffic every single source a student uses for a paper. Annotated bibs help, but I always feel as though students will never go the extra mile to find decent sources beyond the required minimum for their papers.

The other issue that I often run into when working on research is plagiarism. It has become so easy for students to take material from a website and pass it off as their own. Of course, it is just as easy to catch them, especially if they are too lazy to cover their tracks, (I love it when they leave hyperlinks in their papers). I look forward to teaching the research paper, but I also know the stuggles that come with it as well. Technology has made research much more accessible and teachable within the classroom, but it causes just as many problems as it solves for the instructor.