 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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This month we focus on educational computing, a topic that touches students
of all ages. My children are still at primary school and I get to see a little of educational computing at
that end of the scale. At the other end, we have institutions such as the University of the Third Age (U3A),
which has been mentioned in our pages in the past. The U3As cover many topics in addition to computing and
one starting point to obtain more information about U3A is at
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~u3avic/
Recently, my son Keith (one of our Family members) announced that he had to write an essay about a famous
person. I wondered if he was going to write about a monarch, a conqueror, a politician, a sportsperson and
the like. No such luck. He was going to write about the creator of Pokemon, that confounded marketing gimmick
that makes a serious dent in my wallet.
I put it to Keith that it would easier to write about someone a little more famous, as there would be a lot
of information about them on the Internet and on Microsoft Encarta. After some discussion, he decided to
write about Bill Gates because the DoJ ruling had just been on the news. Our copy of Encarta is the 1998
version but it had sufficient information about Mr Gates. We also visited his site at http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/ and some other pages found
through a Web search.
The point of mentioning this uninteresting domestic interchange is that when Keith's teacher commented on his
essay, he said that it looked as though it had come from Encarta but it was written in his own words.
Actually, very little of the article had come from Encarta, but then the highlights of his life are covered
in every account of his life. The DoJ material had come from news media accounts. I did not have the copy of
Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) Deluxe CD2000, reviewed in this issue, for it would have been one more point of
reference.
I am impressed that children are taught at an early age to list a bibliography in their essays. Teachers have
Web access and are quite adept at spotting Web-sourced plagiarism. Not surprisingly, some Internet
entrepreneurs offer customised essays for a fee. The technology may have changed, but the challenges faced by
educators have not.
While writing the EB review, I revisited an old dilemma. I was rather annoyed that some of the material I
decided to look up was out of date - as much as 17 years in one case. I was tempted to can the product
because my limited observation cast doubt on the remaining 83,000 articles.
I looked at EB in greater detail as well as the "big picture". Two CD-ROMs cannot compete with the thousands,
nay, millions of CD-ROMs worth of material found on the Web. EB has had the benefit of several generations of
editors and researchers, whereas the material on the Web can range from reliable to the unreliable. In that
light, EB is a great resource and so I recommend it. It should not be one's only reference but one of
them.
Reprinted from the August 2000 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
