Faculty acceptance of the World Wide Web for student research

摘要

Since its development in 1991, the Web has become a pervasive research source for students on college and university campuses throughout the United States. Increasing computer instruction in elementary and secondary schools and the growing numbers of personal computers in homes have resulted in a high computer literacy rate among students entering college, often higher than that of their instructors, and in a growing familiarity with the use of the Web. However, despite the Web's popularity and widespread use, and despite the volume of information available, many academic librarians report that students often use the Web inefficiently and appear unaware of its limitations, failing to recognize issues of reliability, validity, or authority. As Cheryl LaGuardia wrote, "users have been set loose (or free, depending upon your point of view) across the web, around the world, throughout the online universe, groping for data, grasping at what we may consider information straws."(FN1) But how do teaching faculty view their students' use of the Web? To work effectively with students engaged in course-related research, academic librarians need to understand faculty attitudes toward the Web as a research tool. The research described here centers on a survey of full-time faculty designed to determine faculty attitudes toward their students' use of the Web and toward the acceptability of the Web as a student research tool. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE A substantial body of literature already exists on acceptance and use of the Internet and the Web in academia. As pointed out by Susan S. Lazinger, Judit Bar-Ilan, and Bluma C. Peritz, this research tends to cluster in three areas: studies ofgeneral use patterns; studies of Internet use by librarians and other information professionals; and studies of use by college and university faculty.(FN2) However, faculty attitudes toward their students' use of the Internet have yet to be investigated.