World Wide Web: General Description

The World Wide Web nowadays is considered as a vast ocean of information that is readily accessible to almost all of the students anywhere and anytime across the Internet. Therefore, it is an indisputable fact that it gives them tremendous advantages when doing school projects. However, it can be argued that the World Wide Web has virtually destroyed the quality of students’ assignments. For a better understanding, both the benefits and the drawbacks of the World Wide Web in studying will be exhaustively discussed in this essay.

The World Wide Web is widely recognized to be an increasingly popular information-seeking channel in the human beings’ life, especially students due to its dominant advantages. To begin, thanks to the widespread availability of World Wide Web, college students can economize their time by gathering a huge amount of required information in a mere instant instead of the time-consuming seeking on printed materials. According to an article by Kuiper et al (2005), learners make fewer attempts to get information because searching on the World Wide Web is assessed as relatively easy and more quickly than finding in books. It is evident that learners, from preschool, to graduate school, will have much more time to predominantly concentrate on their assignments with the aim to achieve the results as desired.

Further and more importantly, though, World Wide Web has been characterized as an online library containing a tremendous amount of valuable and comprehensive information preferred by globally famous authors. By the way of illustration, Lawrence (2005) asserted that “Among various resources for learning, staff and students throughout much of the world can retrieve seemingly endless volumes of information from all over the globe.” By using this potentially important tool, people can explore very latest information with numerous academic sources, which makes the assignments more effective and informative.

Beside various positive aspects of information accessibility, using the Web appears to expose several obvious shortcomings that are attributed to the destruction of students’ assignments. The most manifest disadvantage of the Web is the frequent appearance of a substantial number of unauthentic and incredible sources of information, which makes students confused and extraordinarily difficult in choosing worthy sources. To put it differently, there will be materials published freely without being checked as World Wide Web is a public environment and lacks of bibliographic control, which is responsible for the inaccuracy and unreliability of numerous research findings ((Kibbee, n.d). The information is becoming unfiltered, so it is virtually essential for researchers to evaluate and determine confidential materials. That leads to the fact that students may seek imprecise information and then their assignments can be considerably underestimated.

Apart from this, using WWW frequently will adversely influence students’ learning attitude. That means students become lazier, more passive and less creative. To clarify, Lawrence (2005) stated that “It is still questionable whether the convenience of the Web makes students procrastinate their assignments or the variety of information and games distract them from beginning their assignments. Their way of completing assignments hastily by extracting data from the Web could distract them from deeply studying the details in their textbooks or journal papers.” Because of the availability of information, students always surf the web to search the needed materials without mobilizing their own background knowledge and thinking anything. That may contribute to plagiarism by stealing the intellectual property of others. James et al (2002) states that ‘there are lots of reasons why students commit plagiarism but the Web has made plagiarism in written assignment easier for students (qtd. in Hariyanti, 2015, p. 269).

By the way of conclusion, World Wide Web has both benefits and pitfalls. Through a substantial number of above practical evidence, students should acknowledge the negative influences of the Web on the quality of their tasks and judge information carefully at the same time so that they can get better results at school. Additionally, to be enormously beneficial from it, it is advisable for students to consider World Wide Web as a supporting educational tool for seeking information and not largely depend on it.