Professors are dead-set against the internet as a research tool, and I've yet to figure out why. It is the single most revolutionary tool of academic research since the invention of the library.

Yet instead of allowing students access to this marvel, professors expect their pupils to physically travel to the university library in order to access a poorly organized, difficult-to-use, highly restricted propietary system, the information in which will be orders of magnitude less illuminating than what can be found on the internet. The student will usually have to wait in line for the privilege. Alternatively, they can beg and plead at three different departments for a login to access aforementioned system remotely, but it usually won't work.

The professors' sole argument seems to be that any two-bit schmuck can make a website, and they don't want their students relying on shoddy information. This seems fair on the surface, but is extremely misguided, for it is only by allowing students to sift through the detrius that they'll develop the skill to detect bullshit when they see it. By artificially constraining students to a sheltered electric bubble, they're denying one of few chances in the academic world to excercise any amount of thought at all. The "research paper" becomes nothing more than an example of how well the student can regurgitate prefabricated, school-approved information without the need for synthesizing any of it into a cohesive whole.

Of course, as a student myself, I cheat. I cheat every chance I get. I write the majority of my paper before I do any research, and look for "sources" afterwards to supplement myself. I used quotation marks because, naturally, I am not using the sources I cite, but rather gathering enough information on Amazon that I can create the bibliography for the book I allegedly referenced, using MLA-approved format (or Chicago, or APA, or whatever equally arbitrary means of citation the professor wants this time). I use the internet for any reasarch I actually do, and more often than not, it provides me with exactly what a source should -- a concise discussion of the topic at hand, often with an angle I wouldn't have thought of on my own and would never have been able to find in a library without sifting through twenty books for seven hours. If the professor wants copies of the sources, I muck about with it in a word processor to the point where it looks like what I could get from their atrocious incomprehensibly-acronymed database. The result is a well-written, insightful paper that appears to play by the rules, but the professor never notices the difference, and I usually get high marks.

The irony is that I feel I am actually learning more, and doing so faster, with this method than I would be capable of by strictly conforming to the rules. Of course, since the topic is likely as not some ridiculous nonsense I have zero interest in and which will never have any applicability to my life, it quickly fades from memory, but at least I can congratulate myself for learning how to manipulate the system -- a lesson far more valuable than any treatise on The Grapes Of Wrath can ever be.