Tuesday, June 17, 2008      “Google is not research.”      On
the surface, this seems to be a self-evident truism; a bane of
all instructors looking at the paltry bibliographies of their
student’s “research” papers. A topic is assigned, the student
does their due diligence by “Googling” expected key words, and
undoubtedly one of those key terms turns up Wikipedia.
Information is found, two more sites consulted and the topic is,
according to the students, covered. Laptop case closed, time to
move on.      InsideHigherEd today offers a story about the
Cornell Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative, which
seeks an “understanding [of] how students perceive university
research.” One of the expressed goals, as stated by Cornell
professor Kathy Lee Berggren, is “to ‘really learn how to use a
library whether they’re in it or not.’”      Cornell’s summer
seminar seeks to build on the work from Berkeley who, undergoing
an accreditation review, sought to understand how to incorporate
research skills into the co