I am deciding if I am going to dispose/recycle/donate hand-me-down elementary and high school textbooks that came from me. These are books on English and Filipino grammar, science and mathematics. Science laws and grammar rules will remain consistent on the Internet as compared to Philippine history which varies depending on the author. Remember the historian Zaide? No. Not the space police. Meanwhile, I think religion books are safe to be given away but if I allow my younger sister to depend on what the Wikipedia says, she might stumble upon on related articles for disbelieving Catholicism.

I need to drop Encarta compact discs too. They were outdated now. The pictures that can be included on the high school research project could be taken from Google web results. Furthermore, there are less entries about the Philippines on those encyclopedia compared to the vast sea of information where you can fish in WWW.

How about college handouts? Let’s say the typewritten UP Diliman’s Natural Science (NatSci) booklets. Will they still be the source?

Yeah, it is general room cleaning now. These things, old science books, encyclopedia and handouts, all remind me of hardcore researching. Nowadays, this generation of students depend a lot from search engines. This is very evident on how my younger sister do her research. I can’t blame her on her methodologies since it is very practical. What she does on top is to beautify her project with scrapbook thingies for extra credit. Actually, I influence her to Google things. To answer her questions, I can’t remember quite in which grade/year to look for the things she need. Believe me, there are topics already covered at earlier year or grade.

I miss the times going to libraries. I remember my first year high school when it still discussing the Philippine geography, history and civics and culture. Oh HEKASI! Nope, that’s grade school! There were no blogs yet about what I research (and no idea on what blog during that time). That’s why I decided to go the capitol’s library and need to sign up to have access on its books. Very old school. It has no online catalog of books so I have scan through sections. All the dust and bugs you’ll get. The class including the teacher knows that our own library can’t help.

I also remember a mathematics extra credit project to research on special properties, science, facts about circles. There’s this classmate who asked her mother to do the research paper for her. We were all impressed on the thickness of her project. So she ended up winning Annual Award’s Ms. Thesis Ang Project. But when I curiously check the content, I see that everything that Google returns like Britney’s Oops I Did It Again video forming a circle and cheat codes with circle character are included. I think my sister is very wise to prune the search results besides the fact that it is costly to print a page so she cuts her research.

I guess Google for students are still advisable for practicality sake during high school. But when it comes to college (or should I say in UP), you really need to have a second library card, fill up reservation forms and the like even though there are several computer shops outside the library. Well, there are computer terminals also inside the library but the most relevant topics are still found on the library. You gotta love the UP CoE and Math libraries.

Also, UP and our department discourage plagiarism. We don’t copy and paste articles. It is very important to cite them if you have. But having pages of endnote citations do not give additional credit. I seldom see a 1.0 paper with several related literatures without having it compared at least or prove or disprove the arguments the source provided.

Well so much for this stuff. I decided to post about Google researching when several students came across with my site searching for Filipino idioms and proverbs. They landed at this page: Mga Kasabihan at Salawikain. They should really be careful.

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