Yahoo! Intern Roundtable: Internet & Academics

DOREEN:

Welcome to the second intern podcast for Yodel Anecdotal Yahoo!'s corporate blog. Today we're going to be talking about internet and academics. My name is Doreen Block and I'm going to be moderating this discussion again today. I've brought together six other interns, so why don't we go around and introduce ourselves?

GASTON:

Hi, I'm Gaston DeVigne, I'm 20 years old. I attend Washington University in St. Louis and I'm studying finance and economics and I intern with the data center strategy group.

ADDIE:

Hi, my name is Addie Lee. I am 34 years old. I go to Georgia Tech and I'm a Masters student in HCI. And I'm interning this summer at Yahoo! Personals.

NATE:

Hi, I'm Nate Ebrahimoon. I am 17 years old. I go to Las Gatos High School and I'm interning in the policy department.

CHEN:

Hi, my name's Chen Yang. I'm 26 years old. I go to NYU and I'm interning at international vertical search.

RICHARD:

Hi, I'm Richard Crowley. I am 21 years old. I go to Washington University in St. Louis and I'm interning with Site Ops this summer.

BRIANNA:

Hi, my name is Brianna Satinoff, I am 20 years old. I go to University of Michigan and I'm interning in the web map group.

DOREEN:

Great. So let's just talk really generally. What is the internet's role in academics? Who wants to start off?

NATE:

SparkNotes.

DOREEN:

SparkNotes. All right, let's talk about that. Go ahead.

NATE:

All right. Well I probably haven't read a book all the way through for about a year now.

DOREEN:

Wow, impressive.

NATE:

I've maintained A's in English.

DOREEN:

Okay.

NATE:

So it's cool, 'cause you know, I can go on SparkNotes, I can read the notes that I need to read, you know, to have essay questions to help you out. They have quotes if you need quotes for an essay, so it just brings everything together. It's a cool site. It's probably not your answer you wanted, but I mean, it works.

DOREEN:

No, that's definitely true, I definitely for AP English used SparkNotes. I hope my English teacher isn't listening but yeah, I think oftentimes I would read - I'd have to skim a lot of the chapters, etc., and then you'd go back and get the full context and make sure that you understood everything that was going on, so, yeah. Brianna?

BRIANNA:

I think SparkNotes is one example of how online resources are replacing pencil and paper resources. So for example, you know, a few years earlier, like when I was in middle school, people used to get Cliff Notes and like actually go to the store and buy them on paper and read them and now no one does that anymore. They just read SparkNotes online. And it's the same thing for a lot of things whether it's reading academic papers or anything like that.

ADDIE:

Has anyone used Google Scholar?

DOREEN:

What's that?

ADDIE:

You know, it's a lot of published papers and a lot of academic journals and other students theses and papers and things like that. And I used - I love looking at other universities who have my program, so it's HCI so it's a little bit specific, so I love going to other universities that I know that has very similar program as mine, like Berkley has it and so does Michigan and CMU and just go directly to their sites and see what other students are doing.

DOREEN:

What is HCI by the way?

ADDIE:

Oh, it's human computer interaction.

DOREEN:

I see. So does that help you write papers or...?

ADDIE:

It does. It gives me really great ideas and then it also lets me know - it kind of helps me validate ideas too, right. So this is what I'm thinking. What are other people thinking in the academic arena? And there are all kinds of papers written about it. And you know, and so it helps me maybe eliminate some topics that I may want to talk about but because it's redundant or it just gives me an idea of something new that I could do.

RICHARD:

Well the point of Google Scholar is to limit the normal Google index to credible resources, so you're not sifting through people's MySpace accounts that have these.

DOREEN:

We exhausted that topic the last time, right? Another thing that just came into mind while we were talking. So some people are using like these online translators for their language classes, which is slightly comical at times because you get these horrendous translations, but I was wondering if anybody's actually used that or -

NATE:

Been there, done that.

DOREEN:

Really?

NATE:

I - no, it was not a good experience. They're not accurate at all. You know, I had a Spanish paper, you know, 3rd year Spanish is kind of intense, so you can't really - you can't pull something off the internet that's a direct translation. So I did that and I turned it in, got it back. It was just like a rough draft of something. I just wanted to get it done really quick. It was late at night. Got it done, turned it in, came back the next day, red marks all over the paper and it was just - I knew it was going to happen. I didn't think it was that good.

RICHARD:

The Babel Fish translator that Yahoo! has and AltaVista had beforehand works really well for short phrases, 'cause it can get the out of order - you know how Spanish has words after the noun instead of before in English. It can get that right in short phrases, but it can't do that in long drawn-out sentences and whole paragraphs. It just chokes on it.

GASTON:

I think sometimes it's easy just to use it as a like a dictionary too, like I guess I know I studied Spanish, and you know, you can just put in a single word and I think even with short phrases, sometimes you're taking a gamble and I think it's really easy just to use it really quickly when you're in a class and say well, you know, what's this word in a different language.

DOREEN:

I haven't gone to college yet but for those of you who are there, to what extent do you guys use the internet in your classrooms on your personal laptops? Does that ever get distracting or is that more of a helpful thing?

RICHARD:

Well a lot of professors in the engineering school are savvy enough to have course websites with a lot of interesting and necessary information, but some of the classes that I've taken outside of the engineering school, the professors will avoid use of technology at all costs. You still have the library available to do anything you want for papers and for assignments but in class there's very little going on in some cases.

ADDIE:

So I use a website called Zero Homework and you know, you give access to other people so that they can take a look at your notes too, but I religiously take notes into Zero Homework by subject, and then other people that you let people, you know, see what kind of notes that you're taking, you can have access to each other's notes. So that's really cool.

DOREEN:

Maybe let's talk about Wikipedia? One of the things that I find probably most useful on the internet right now, at least for me. Great reference.

RICHARD:

The one class at Wash U that engineers have to take that is writing intensive is called technical writing and its goal is to give you the reference manual and documentation skills, you know, for your technical career, because writing English papers about the Canterbury Tales really just doesn't do it for engineers. It gets you nothing. So this technical writing class, we learned the more practical side of it, writing that we might use in our daily jobs. And the one paper that I had to do research for, I used Wikipedia exclusively for my research, and it turned out to have much more in depth. I looked at the library as well just for comparison, for curiosity. It was much more in depth on every technical subject out there, and I think it's being fleshed out in the other subjects as well.

DOREEN:

Yeah, definitely I find it useful for non technical things and I think that it's interesting how you can start one place and you'll end up somewhere totally different just by clicking through -- personal experience there. Well, while we're talking about Wikipedia, maybe let's talk about Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers was I think launched during the summer time for us, so that was when they had the big campaign that is, and so I guess that's why I haven't seen too much kind of academic oriented questions as well as answers. But maybe it will be interesting to see when school kicks off to see if students start using that more.

CHEN:

Yeah, I think the idea of Yahoo! Answers starts from Korea and became very big in Taiwan. And in Taiwan people use it extensively. So sometimes say if I'm writing some C++ code and I find that I need to have some insightful information say about the structure or something like that, I'll just go to Yahoo! Answers and sometimes I can really find the real, real good answers because sometimes they'll give you the examples and sometimes like they would discuss the difference between like two people's code and they will be very, very useful.

RICHARD:

It all ends up depending on the type of people that start to answer questions on there. And I've seen a lot just on the initial US version that people with PhDs in subjects that are very knowledgeable have started spreading what they know kind of for the common good.

DOREEN:

Okay. Let's talk about negative sides of having the internet in academics and plagiarism, maybe we can talk about that? Anyone want to start us off?

ADDIE:

Well you know, I feel like I'm very - I'm even more cognizant of any sort of degree of plagiarism because it is so readily accessible and people can check up on you, just like that. So I feel like I'm even more careful because everyone has access to this information, and if I can find it, anyone else can find it.

DOREEN:

That's a great point. Yeah?

GASTON:

I think also we have freshman year writing intensive course at our university and they had us upload all of our papers online and they have pretty good capability to check for a lot of that stuff now. So there comes a point where I think actually some of the technology, though it might have increased plagiarism for a time, might actually kind of help cut back on some of it after a point as well, so I think that might have turned a corner.

NATE:

Yeah, it seems like in high school what we have is we have a program that's called TurnItIn.com. I don't know if you guys worked with it? And every paper that we turn in or that we - like essays for instance, mostly essays obviously, we turn them in through this website and I guess if the teacher checks the website it gives her like some kind of message saying there's something similar to this one, and the teacher can check them both out, compare them and see if the student did plagiarize. So yeah, technology's definitely taken the lead on this one and I don't think it's going to be an issue anymore. As long as teachers use the technology that they have.

DOREEN:

Yeah, go ahead Brianna?

BRIANNA:

When my teachers first started using TurnItIn.com and that kind of thing, I was worried I would somehow be falsely accused of plagiarism like if my paper just happened to look like someone else's paper, even if we didn't collaborate at all. And I don't know if that's happened or not to people.

DOREEN:

Yeah, I think at a certain point teachers just have to use their own judgment.

CHEN:

When I was an undergrad, my professor once told us if we copy each other's code, it's possible that they would use a program to check up on everybody's homework so that he can just call us for the plagiarism. So I would say to a certain degree technology does help the professor to catch your plagiarism so it's very, very dangerous if you want to copy other's code.

NATE:

So yeah, I think it's extremely hard to define plagiarism. Because on websites you look at the source, you have the same exact information, you're looking, you're taking this information directly out of the website, and when you take it out of there, it's hard to put it into your exact words, because some of the words you need to keep. So who's to say what is - like how far can you go into when you're in the plagiarism zone.

GASTON:

I don't think plagiarism is really as grey as you make it seem. I think it's more of a - if you take your own notes and you read something and you actually try and study it for yourself and then you've actually learned it and then you actually restate it in your own words, it will come across different. It will have a different twist to it.

DOREEN:

I was always taught the kind of three word rule back in middle school, but I think in the end, when in doubt just ask. Talk to a professor, talk to other people that might have experience and that's how you can deal with plagiarism issues. Oh let's talk about filters on campuses. Had anybody had experiences with campuses putting filters, schools putting filters on campuses? Yeah?

NATE:

I can make this easy. Alright. So my high school used to allow kids to go on Myspace.com and kids would go sometimes in all periods, let's say they don't have a third period, girls and boys but mostly girls go on, check their MySpaces, do their comments, this and that, during their third period which they didn't have. So after a while, about halfway through the year, the high school actually blocked that site. Everyone - it became like a big deal. We had newspaper articles on it and everyone just got really upset because you know, it was a good way for them to kill some time. But yeah, so they blocked MySpace.com, which makes sense, I think.

RICHARD:

I don't particularly have a problem with blocking MySpace, 'cause there's very little chance anything educational could come out of it. But the general idea of blocking websites in schools I think is a horrendous idea because it opens the door for all sorts of political agendas. The real question, I would think, is why do people have free periods at your high school, but that's for another time.

DOREEN:

Oh really? Oh we did too. So in our district they did a district-wide filter, and that actually got a lot of - well, mixed press I guess I would say, because a lot of parents were pushing for a filter because they didn't want their elementary school kids having porn pop-ups on their computer, which in my opinion is a good reason why we would have a filter. At the same time it was also blocking out websites that mentioned the word, like lesbian or gay in them and then they had issues because I guess like the gay history site or something, which has a lot of educational value, was being blocked. So I guess they had this process for where you'd submit websites to be unblocked by the district.

ADDIE:

Yeah, I would rather that the school will say you know, in certain classes we will completely block internet access. I would rather do that than filtering, because to me, that's just saying hey, pay attention. The professor wants you to pay attention to his lecture notes versus we are going to censor what you see.

DOREEN:

That's an interesting proposal.

RICHARD:

And teaching kids responsible use, you know where not to go, what looks fishy, what kind of searches are going to get them in trouble. How to use - Google and Yahoo! - both I think have some kind of safe search capabilities. All of those things put together need to be taught to students rather than just trying to shield them through brute force technology.

DOREEN:

Okay. So this question is directed perhaps more towards Addie and Chen. Can you maybe describe how the internet has really changed academics in your experiences?

ADDIE:

You know, I'll tell you my communication style has changed a lot. So you know, I used to take great care in my email composition to make it more like letters, you know, very formal letters. And I would have never thought to communicate with my professors that way. I mean well the way I communicate with my professors now, it could be through IM or through the twiki or email. But back when I was in college I didn't even have a computer until I was like a sophomore, right. So I would have never thought to communicate to my professors using those modes. I would have thought it would be best and prudent to actually go see them face to face or something like that. So I think communication with my professors has probably increased, right, so it's more of a friendly casual "let's talk" kind of communication rather than these formal, very academic driven, only on topic kind of conversation.

CHEN:

Well to be honest with you, I'm always using computers so I really don't know the difference.

ADDIE:

I wish I could comment on I find the content more credible now versus before, because I really don't. Unless they're a published - like a publication or an academic journal, even Wikipedia I do not take that as credible information. It's really great background information and maybe I might quote it but I still don't know about the credibility thing.

DOREEN:

Of the source. Well I think the nice thing actually about Wikipedia is don't they list all their sources at the bottom, I believe so that you can go and follow up?

RICHARD:

They do list their sources and they say who's been editing the file. You can go through the history of it. There's actually a lot of statistics about how quickly a Wikipedia page gets repaired when you screw it up and the figures are down to the minutes at this point.

BRIANNA:

As far as correcting Wikipedia when a site gets messed up, I don't know if you guys heard this story, but Steven Colbert, the host of the Colbert Report... so on his show he randomly altered the George Washington article to say George Washington did not own slaves, and within minutes it was corrected.

DOREEN:

That's impressive yeah. Okay, so do you think that people are lazier or learning less because the internet is available?

ADDIE:

No, I think we're actually learning more because I love this kind of - and Doreen you mentioned it too, like you know, you're on Wikipedia and then you end up somewhere, right? You end up in some random place. And I love this kind of serendipitous happenstance that you go to some random topic and you're learning about stuff randomly like that. And so I find that my horizon is actually wider because I end up exploring topics that I would have never done before. And then always I find my focus back again and then I think okay no, I need to be really looking at something else like 100 pages back. So I end up getting my work done anyway. But yeah, I don't think it has decreased our knowledge.

DOREEN:

Wow, every hand is raised. Okay. Let's just work our way down. Yeah, Gaston.

GASTON:

I think people are certainly lazier and I think you can stay in your dorm, and I know at our school we have webcasts of classes a lot of times and I think there are people who you can email a lot of your assignments to professors and you can - I wouldn't be surprised if there were some classes where you could almost get away with not ever going into the class or going into the actual - going on campus. You might just be able to stay in your room the whole time and get it done. I think there are some people who still really like to engage other materials and like to go to the library, so I think there are some people who haven't become lazy, but I think generally speaking, you can learn the same amount without ever putting in nearly the same amount of effort, so I think it might easily be an all right type of laziness. I don't know.

ADDIE:

Yeah, it makes you more efficient, right?

GASTON:

Or lazy.

DOREEN:

I think that it's like the two sides to the coin. I don't know if that's the right idiom. Whatever. But I think that there's a lot of distraction that goes on with the internet. Nate?

NATE:

Yeah, so on the high school level it's completely different because you know, you don't have the option of not going to class. You have to go to class. So the internet just serves as a resource I think and you know, of course it's like you - I don't know if you learn more. It depends on what - you learn exactly what you're going for.

CHEN:

Yeah, I think the difference between like go to school and to - I mean go to class and using the internet instead of going to class is in class you have a more interactive response with your professor or with your classmates. But on the internet you have the back up for like the multimedia so that you can see what's actually happening.

RICHARD:

Well and the thing about people becoming lazy is that the easiest fix for it is good professors, because people who see oh this professor is actually going to give me a lot, they are motivated to go to class because it gives them much more than they're going to find looking around on the internet. So some classes, you know, you might have a bad professor and you learn everything you need to from the course website and Google, or Yahoo!... sorry. But some classes the professors are so good that it makes sense to go there and that's ultimately what keeps me going to most of my classes.

DOREEN:

Brianna?

BRIANNA:

At some schools, like University of Florida, they actually offer classes that are only online or only on TV where like there is no section that meets and you take the class by like watching it on TV or reading online.

CHEN:

I have something to say about the bad professors. There's a website called ratemyprofessors.com.

DOREEN:

Oh that's a good point. We should talk about that. Yeah, definitely. Actually I just started choosing classes a couple of weeks ago, and that Ratemyprofessor, Ratemyteachers has been really helpful actually for I mean just to get a sense of the teaching style, people leave lots of comments about does this person do a lot of lectures versus labs, versus other things. And then you can really gauge kind of this is my learning style, this is what the class is, is it a good match. So I think it's really helpful.

BRIANNA:

Then there's the hot category.

DOREEN:

That's a little bizarre I think.

BRIANNA:

Yeah, there's a chili pepper if people think the professor is hot. I know. You guys haven't seen that?

ADDIE:

Oh, I do not want to think of some of my professors in that way.

BRIANNA:

Me either.

DOREEN:

Maybe it's important to some people. I don't know.

ADDIE:

You know what would be helpful is to know his grades. Like how the professor grades?

CHEN:

Exactly. Like sometimes he will say okay, this professor she sucks, she gives out easy A. So you say okay, I will probably take it because my GPA sucks.

DOREEN:

But then I always wonder if there isn't a lot of response bias coming through there and so I think you have to take it with a grain of salt as well. It's a good guide, but at the same time keep in mind that these could be -

ADDIE:

It could be personal, right? It could be a personal comment, yeah.

DOREEN:

Any other sites that you think are really good for academics?

CHEN:

There is another website I would like to talk about. Howstuffworks. It's not like Wikipedia so that people can edit it. So you have a very centralized answer, so you know those answers are like in a way authorized.

DOREEN:

Oh that's right because their titles are in a query format. I was going to say with Digg and websites like that - I know a lot of their sections are more technical but do you think that they're going to start having more educational stuff as well?

RICHARD:

Well the new Digg version that just was launched in the last few weeks encompasses a pretty broad range of general news topics as well. I think they just added a sports section as well. So hopefully the political and all that can start being voted to the top and all that now.

DOREEN:

Okay. So I think we're going to wrap up our discussion. Thank you very much for joining me today.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]