A few months ago my 11-year-old daughter was researching a paper on Jesse Owens for social studies. She didn't go to the library, pull down reference books and fill up 3x5 index cards. She went onto Google. She found plenty of materials. But when I asked to read her completed paper, it was nothing but a cut-and-paste job from various web sites on Owens; she even included, quite randomly, part of a press release about some recent celebration in his honor.

My daughter's work ethic may not always be what I'd like it to be, but she's bright and can write more than sufficiently for a 5th grade social studies class. Yet she seemed flat-out baffled when I explained to her that the paper wasn't acceptable. "Is the information wrong?" she asked. "Did I leave something out?" No to both. But she hadn't written her own paper, and more importantly, she hadn't learned anything, as was clear when I began to quiz her about the content in her own "paper." Hard to transfer knowledge in the two seconds it takes to select and move.

BBC News has a story about what they call the "Google Generation," children growing up in a cut-and-paste world where the meaning of learning and scholarship is blurry. Leeds Metropolitan U. Professor Sally Brown is quoted in the story about today's students:

"They are post-modern, eclectic, Google-generationists, Wikipediasts, who don't necessarily recognise the concepts of authorships/ownerships."

Brown is discussing UK university students, but we're increasingly seeing this among my former colleagues in the Fourth Estate, and as a parent I see it starts far younger than that. When my daughter thinks of the library, it's a place where she and her brother used to check out picture books and now check out chapter books. It's not a place of research. That lack of appreciation falls on my shoulders. I need to do a better job as a parent of explaining that while the Internet can be a powerful research tool, it's meant to assist one in doing one's own learning, not just as a source to parrot somebody else's words.

Yochai Benkler and others sing the praises of Wikipedia as a model of social networking and economics. But how much of the text in Wikipedia is original to the contributor? In some cases, I might not want it to be, if the contributor is uninformed or significantly biased. But I think much of the materials there were copied from other sources and not always transparently.

A few weeks ago I was doing some intellectual property research and was reading materials on a WIPO-affiliated web site. A Google search on a narrow topic I wanted more information on suggested a Wikipedia entry as my first choice (as it often does, a sign that Wikipedia's creators understand the nature of Google's search algorithm). While I never rely on Wikipedia as a primary reference, I'm not opposed to glancing at it occasionally, so I pulled up the link. Lo and behold, the exact text I had just read on the WIPO site was in the Wikipedia entry, but there was no indication it came from WIPO. At least, I thought, the plaigarist stole from a site that presumably has some credibiity in the topic being discussed. Still, I figured that would probably be cause for termination for a Britannica employee. I wonder what Nicholas Carr, master chronicler of all things Wikipedia, would think.

If you view content in the broader context of "knowledge," then ownership, or authorship, is unimportant. Everything exists to be built upon by someone else. The concept of "original text" becomes moot. Somebody else can come to that Wikipedia entry and rewrite that passage. But of course this world doesn't function without new inputs. We can't keep just repurposing what's already out there. New thoughts have to be conceived, new texts have to be written. Is there a way to fold new knowledge into this wiki batter and still retain a connection to its source? Will future generations develop the ability to discover new knowledge if their skill-sets are best suited for echo chambers?

posted by Patrick Ross @ 11:10 AM | Academia, Free Culture Movement, Internet: P2P, Search Engines..., Universities

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