Who needs creativity when there is mass internet searching sites? I personally have an experience with this phenomenon. I am [or was at one point] a student in the IB (International Baccalaureate) Program in my high school. Which involved writing more papers and producing more original ideas for projects than a non-IBer could ever imagine. For one, we (as juniors in a class with seniors who would sit their exams the next May) also had the...opportunity to practice for the lovely torture that is the IB French Oral. It is a taped speech between 3-4 minutes on a topic of your choice that relates to France or the French anything in some way. In French. Followed by a 3-4 minute question and answer session with out teacher about our topic. In French. And a final 3-4 minutes of general conversation. In French.
So out of all the topics that you could possibly come up with, what do you choose? It should be easy enough to come up with a topic and talk about it for a few minutes, right? For me and my classmates, no. So me, as the...resourceful IB student, googles (or blackle, as my sister constantly corrects me) for a possible topic. Which I changed to I can to both years [one change in a word can alter everything].
But to approach the actual point: I, instead of pondering endlessly over what I should talk about, relied on someone else's ingenuity to provide a topic that I could live with. A crutch, if you will.
And then you get used to having and relying on this crutch. A past math teacher assigned us math projects, I kid you not. But for the last project of the year, instead of handing out the topics and the group assignments, he told us that we could work in pairs or alone, and that we had to provide him with FIVE topics, and he would choose which ones from those. And no two groups could do the same topic. Of course, we were in Pre-Calculus, so we did not yet have an extensive acquaintance with math as something that we might be interested in. It was one of the more brutal classes, trying to scrounge together a topic, since myself and my groupmate did not have access to a computer at that time, and were thus effectively cut off from our lifeblood(even if the metaphor seems a bit extreme, it was fairly adequate).
Now this could just be me, and I could be lazy. But think of all the annoying science fair projects you may have been forced to do in grade school. Where did you get the idea? Pull it from your head? Possibly. Returning to my aforementioned sibling, her entire project this past year was taken from a website. She modified the materials to what we could get a hold of, but the procedure in general was the same. Granted, for some this would be needed, possibly lacking the innate creativity that a high-end-of-the-spectrum-ESE student has the tendency to possess.
So is this laziness, this googling to solve your problems? Or is it being resourceful and using the resources available to you to the best of your ability, if that ability is an intimate knowledge of the workings of every search engine the internet offers you?
Opinions, anyone? Am I completely and utterly insane? Should I just stick to girly subjects, like complaining about asinine members of the male species?
Google just gives you access to more branching off points to allow your creativity to expand upon.
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
- William Shakespeare
The internet is just another source for ideas. By looking at google, you can find ideas that are relevant or that you may not have thought of otherwise. Is going through a book so much worse? You just need to be able to make it original. In one science fair, I performed an experiment to determine where fruit flies came from. I gave credit to the original experiment. And any project requires research, usually secondary is the most practical.
Like what you've read? Well, then here's more:
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/tricia0711