Blogs Hit the Academy! (Sorta)

For the first time, I am getting student papers that cite blogs in their bibliographies. Amusingly, one student cited PoliBlog (this post on Mill's Harm Principle), however I am fairly certain that the student didn't know who owned the site. Rather, the second item that comes up on a Google search of "harm principle" gives PoliBlog so I suspect the usage was utter serendipity. A second paper, in another class, cites one of Joe Carter's posts on immigration at the Evangelical Outpost.

Of course, what this actually reflects are the poor research skills of students who think that putting keywords into Google equates to research. It further demonstrates that they lack the skills needed to discern whether what they have found is news, opinion or scholarly analysis.

More evidence that Google is the new "research" tool: another student made wide use of Wikipedia.

Back to blogs: what this further demonstrates is the prevalence of blogs in search engine results. We are everywhere.