There is an interesting article here about a university professor who bans her students from using Google and Wikipedia in their assignments, saying that they are “churning out banal and mediocre work by using what search engines provided them.” She effectively argues that using search engines (and wikipedia) do not only offer students shallow (or potentially misleading) ideas, but also deprives them of interpretative and analytic skills.

The fun thing about the article is her response: “I give [my students] a reading list to work from and expect them to cite a good number of them in any work they produce… I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels,” and she blames this downwards trend on the decline of libraries. So, ranking query results on a search engine filters information, but so does she- and her reading list is the better authority? Probably, given that she is an expert in the course she teaches. Do search engines do a bad job at capturing the quality of information? Do they breed laziness, and axe our ability to think? Or is this just another “againster” who rejects technology (feeling the pages- is she serious? if she dislikes the content on wikipedia so much, why doesn’t she change it?)?