Group items tagged

However, as with annotations in paper books, sometimes the value of an annotation goes beyond its content. Marshall (1998) suggests that the very act of evaluating a handwritten annotation's relevance creates a level of critical engagement that would not happen while reading a clean copy of a book. Marshall studied university students' annotations in textbooks, and found that students preferred books that had been marked by previous readers, as long as the marks were intelligible.

Similarly, Sherman (2008) studied marginalia in English Renaissance texts and found that students of the time were routinely taught that simply reading a book was insufficient. In order to have a "fruitful interaction" (p. 4) with a text, marking it up with one's thoughts and reactions was considered essential. Marginalia and other signs of engagement and use – even such apparently content-neutral additions as food stains – Sherman sees as valuable evidence of reader reaction, and the place of the physical information object in people's lives.

In a study of flickr.com, Ames and Naaman (2007) created a taxonomy of motivations for annotation along two dimensions: sociality and function. The latter dimension echoes people's motivation to annotate printed textbooks: the function of making important or interesting passages more easily findable for later review. The sociality dimension is a component of the Web infrastructure – making photographs findable for others, and creating shared tagsets for people with similar interests, so they might collaborate more easily. In this sense, photographs are boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), around which diverse individuals can interact and communities can build (Gal, Yoo and Boland 2006). Digital collection items can also be boundary objects, even if those conversations take place asynchronously.

So schools do not teach effective use of Google, of text-messaging, of instant-messaging. They don't teach collaboration. They barely teach communication outside the stilted prose only academics use. No wonder students are prepared for nothing except more school.

There is also the issue of educational discrimination. When schools fight against technology, they are fighting access to education for people who learn and function differently. Technology, from computers to calculators to classroom cellphones, enables a wide variety of students who would otherwise be left out to participate and succeed. Technology in the hands of all students allows disabilities and functional deficits to be invisibly accommodated so that knowledge can be developed, nurtured, and evaluated on terms fair to everyone.So, no, the problem is not cheating. The problem is firmly one of instructional and evaluation technique. It will not be solved until teachers and professors figure out that understanding and the ability to work with knowledge is what counts, and that anything you can instantly Google, or store in your calculator, or retrieve via quick text-message or phone call need not be remembered, nor tested, because, obviously, you will always be able to instantly Google it, or store it in your cellphone, or get someone to text it to you.