Introduction
Old fashioned bibliographies...sigh. Won't miss them. Teaching the bibliographic format is boring. Writing them out is boring. Marking them is even more boring.
Now we have Landmark Citation machine that does it all for us. It's so easy; it almost feels like cheating. David Warlick who created it has a briilant code of ethics for teachers and students.
However, teaching the necessity for the ethical use of other people's ideas, images, words, and sounds, is as vital as ever. In fact it may be even more important now that the students have tremendous copying machines (aka computers). It may have been tedious before to trace a picture out of a book, to handwrite a copy of a brother's essay. But now students can kidnap the Taj Mahal and a 250-page description of it with the flick of a mouse.
Not that this is a bad thing. Instant access to architectural wonders is wonderful. The challenge is in what they do with the information they have gathered.
The challenge is in keeping track of where their ideas come from.
It was hard enough to explain to the kids the reason they were being forced to do a bibliography ( "So other people who want to find out more, can refer to your sources " - this is lame reasoning - perhaps in grownup professional circles, but no one was ever going to run to the library and borrow the books etc.). A more honest answer would be have been (" so the teacher can check your sources and see where your brilliant paragraphs got ripped off from").
There never was a pressing need to do bibliographies at the school level - But now there is.
Students need to understand where they fit into the world of ideas, proprietary, copyrighted and open access. Online research involves scanning dozens of sites, cutting and pasting; then standing back from it all, organize it around a thesis, using logical thought and evidence as proof - original writing. The Digital "Works Cited" or "Works Consulted" page (formerly know as Bibliography) is a meta-cognitive map, on the screen where the links actually take the reader instantly to the source. (No more do trekking to the corner library to find an esoteric magazine article.)
Digitally-created assignments are by their very nature part of the World Wide Web. They need only to be published and our students are instantly part of the global virtual community .
Citing sources (linking) is part of the culture of the web. More and more places have created easy to cut-and-paste citation (e.g. Wikipedia, Canadian Encyclopedia, Online Periodical Databases).
Many sites offer copyright advice to readers. Here's a terrific site worth checking out - Copyright For Students.
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Now it is possible, not only to list works consulted or cited at the end of an essay; but if the essay is transferred electronically, your students provide you with instant links or even or e-mail you a whole original article directly from a database such as EBSCO.
