The advantages and disadvantages of useing the internet as a research tool.

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about the reader and some of the issues and comments it has risen so far. I have been trying to work out how these technologies have changed the ways in which I work as a practitioner and how I teach art. Today I was reading through one of the year 10’s sketch book to see how she was progressing with her Pop Art project. There was a huge amount of text where she had commented about consumerism, how this effected the movement and how popular culture influenced such artists as Andy Warhol. All of it accurate and very analytical, unfortunately when she was asked why her supporting work (the art work) only really consisted of reproductions of Andy Warhol’s  Campbell Soup and his Coke Bottle’s it became abundantly clear that she actually had no understanding of the movement at all and had just downloaded a load of information from the internet.  Upon further investigation of her book I also found an image that she was claiming to be by Andy Warhol which was in fact merely a picture of a man’s son which he had manipulated to look like it was in the style of this artist.

I know that this kind of blatant plagiarism can happen when researching from books but this event made me think is the availability and ease of the internet making children lazy when it comes to researching.  It’s is perceived as easier to type something into Google then it is to sit in the library and find useful and relevant books.  Don’t get me wrong, when used in the right way I think the internet is a great research tool. The key things that these kids having been missing is, firstly a lot of the articles on the internet is somebody’s personal opinion and should not necessarily be taken as accurate and how to recognise a reliable source. Secondly it is quality that counts not quantity. A pile of information that you don’t understand is not going to help you and more importantly to them will not get you any marks.

I think the main issue is not with the internet itself but the fact that children are not being taught how to use it properly for the purpose of researching. We are currently in a transitional period where we are moving from the idea that we should not rely on the internet for researching as it is an inaccurate source of information as Natalie Less said she was advised when she was at school, to it being much more acceptable, encouraged and a lot more reliable. Unfortunately during the transitional period the responsibility lies with the teacher to educate the children in how to correctly research subjects on the internet but they themselves are unwilling to learn.  With a lot of the older generation of teachers sticking with the school of thought that books are used for research not computers.  Until this changes I think we will continue to see huge chunks of projects cut and pasted from various internet articles.