Since the integration of Internet into everyday life, everything is now made more accessible and more convenient. People no longer need to leave the comfort of their homes to shop, catch up with friends, or even attend school.
The Internet has made it easy for us to do lots of things, one of which is doing research. In the olden days, students will spend countless hours in libraries to gather information for their homework or term papers. They would be poring over encyclopedias and various reference books to put together a solid research paper. Nowadays, students just turn on their computers and go online to search for articles of information that will support their case. While this change in research offers a new insight to shaping the future of education, let us first examine the pros and cons in order to better understand how it will impact the way we perceive things.
On the positive note, online research makes unlimited amount of information available for anyone who has access to computers. Unlike actual libraries, which sometimes pose geographical proximity issues for some students, information online can be accessed anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, doing research online provides you with so many options such as conducting research in various languages if you are doing an assignment that requires you to write in a different language. Lastly, doing online research saves students more time to craft their research paper. What used to take days to look for reference materials in libraries is now replaced with just a few seconds typing keywords online.
Now, let’s move towards the cons of doing online research. While there is a wealth of information available on the World Wide Web, the credibility of these articles cannot be verified right away. Most articles do not cite sources or provide researchers ample information to back up their claims. In some cases, there are articles that illegally use names of established institutions to show for their credibility, and the researcher has very limited resources to verify such things. Another danger in doing online research, most especially in the case of students, is the tempting option to plagiarize. As online information is vast, it is easy for students to look for articles that maybe hard to find and copy it word for word in hopes that teachers would not notice. While there are online tools to help counter plagiarism, teachers may not have the luxury of time to look through each and every term paper handed down to them.
As with any other new technology that has been afforded to us, we must take it with great care and great responsibility. While there are some unfortunate circumstances that make it undesirable for some, its benefits still outweigh these cons in the long run. Online research is only one way to conduct research efficiently—we can still turn to books or conduct interviews and gather insights from real experiences when necessary. We must always remember that information used in our work, no matter where or how we access it, must be correct and have credible sources in order for our research to truly succeed.
