Typically students

• lack any engagement with the assignment
• have poor reading strategies
• do not have a search plan, they will Google or hopefully use the Victorian Education Channel, but will not know what search terms to use.
• struggle with information overload when faced with thousands, hundreds or hundreds of thousands of sites
• paste chunks of text, with no understanding of plagiarism and ethical use of information
• do not use higher order thinking skills but stay in the lower order of recalling

...getting it, dumping it and tarting it

Jamie McKenzie has published and spoken extensively about information technologies, questioning and powerful teaching and exploring how they might best transform classrooms and schools to support student centered, engaged learning.
From Now On his web site uses cartoons to to illustrate the point.

My Pile's Bigger than Your Pile © FNO Press, 2007 http://www.jerryking.com http://fno.org New information technologies have inspired students to scoop and smush at a level unseen before the advent of the Net. Progress?

Getting in Deep © FNO Press, 2006 http://www.jerryking.com http://fno.org Unless students are trained to use the advanced features of search engines like Google, they tend to gather huge piles of pages that contribute little to understanding. Some have likened these piles of information to a landfill. An information landfill?