Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia
A lecturer has criticised students for relying on websites like Google and Wikipedia to do their thinking for them. — Professor Tara Brabazon, from the University of Brighton, said too many young people around the world were taking …
Context & Ripple Effects
A 2007 call by a U.S. senator to bar Wikipedia from schools and libraries had already framed Wikipedia as an institutional concern rather than merely a consumer reference tool. Tara Brabazon brings that argument into university teaching, tying the restriction to students’ dependence on web services for intellectual work.
First-order effects
- Brabazon’s students at the University of Brighton must work without Google and Wikipedia in the affected coursework, shifting immediate responsibility for finding and assessing material back to them.
Second-order effects
- The University of Brighton’s teaching staff face a more explicit choice between accepting web search as part of research practice and imposing source rules intended to test students’ independent evaluation.
Third-order effects
- If similar restrictions spread, higher education’s response to abundant online information will center less on access and more on proving how students verified and developed their own arguments.
The trend: Education institutions are treating search and collaborative reference tools as a verification and assessment challenge, not simply a source of information.