Research Now and Then

Libraries are not only a great place to have a flash mob…

 … but are also essential in college for studying, gathering research, and writing papers.

Library montage

Today we are able to do all of this from the comfort of our own personal computers in practically any environment. Fifty years ago, yes fifty years ago was how long ago it was that my father was a college undergrad like myself. He was an undergrad Psych student, and most of his papers that he can recall were on studies relating to psychological testing done on willing family members and friends. Many sources that he used were from actual physical texts, magazines, and news articles, when a time without internet and online databases sounds like a stone age to those of us blessed to have grown up in a time where we have always known computers and the internet. The idea of writing a paper this way, without the internet or word processors seems a far fetched, even impossible feat to me, already in this short typed blog I have deleted, and inserted multiple words and ideas. Not only is it amazingly helpful to have online sources available at any time, and to be able to constantly edit a document while writing it, the internet can also tell you how to write these papers step by step if you do not already know. Youtube serves many different video how to’s on the subject as well as the internet serving many many pages of instructions. 

Something that I thought was only possible thanks to the internet, buying papers and plagiarising them, has been around since the sixties however. My father tells me that while he never participated in those elicit activities and was always an honorable student, he admits that there was an underground method to buying and selling papers. It was a word of mouth process, only linked with local area schools, for instance Miami Oxford. 

 If one of use did want to go to the library and actually look for a book, we would only have to log onto a computer and type in whatever you're searching for. But there was a day when you had to actually go through filing cabinets and look through cards to find books. I found this great video that provides some understanding to the actual system and how it is classified.

Here’s another flashmob, just because I love them, at UC

I suggest that while all of our new technologies have seemed to make college work easier, that it actually provides many more distractions.