In the past several months I’ve been a volunteer tutor for an eighth grader whose homework assignments often involve looking up terms and concepts on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com. For her most recent project she needs to provide visual images to illustrate her points; these images are also found online. While working on her project, my student often has an IM window open on her screen; she clicks on it every time I turn away. The computer screen thus becomes a single entity containing the private chat and information resources.
Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?
I'm not quite sure what the connection is here between chatting and information resources. Is the connection that there is a lack of discipline in this student's work habits that finds its way into her sourcing? I'm also assuming she had at least 5 chat windows going simultaneously. Bad work habits, to be sure (hold… I just got an email… ok, I'm back); but I think instruction about plagiarism doesn't necessarily intersect with the chatting issue, beyond a common denominator of laziness.
I don't particularly see these as bad assignments, as long as they are placed into some type of larger lesson about doing research and developing information literacy. It's easy enough to cite images from the web, simply by writing the referred url on the back of the index card. The question is, what's to be done with them?
Reply to Luke
Yes, bad work habits surely, but it seems to me some instruction needs to be given to the students with regard to websites as sources of information that need to be cited. It can be too easy for a teenager to think of the Internet as a free and comfortable zone associated with chatting, email, and quick ways to get assignments done.
As for the assignment, the collection of index cards is itself a project that students submit and get extra credit for finding images. I think the learning goal here is not to develop research literacy but simply help students memorize definitions.
Reply to Olga