Since it's one of the best known novels in English, frequently featuring on the high school syllabus along with Shakespeare, it is not surprising that there is a lot of material on Golding's Lord of the Flies available online. When we first discussed the essay in class last Friday, it was suggested that one research option was Google. I agreed then that that was not a bad idea, and I assumed that most of you would probably have a look online to see what others had thought about the novel and your chosen character's role in it; although doing that was certainly not essential, neither was it a bad idea. But as my email of a week ago suggested, there are potential dangers as well as benefits in using online sources.
Although not extremely difficult, it was a challenging question, so a full week seemed reasonable for our first serious essay. My main reason for limiting the question to the first four chapters of the novel was to push you to focus on practising such academic skills as thinking about and presenting solid, relevant evidence for your ideas, and effectively using and citing supporting sources. It was not a question you could expect to sit down and answer well in one afternoon.
Now that the first drafts are finished, what do you think are the pros and cons of using the Internet as a research tool to help with an answer to a question like the one we have been working on past past seven days? What are the very real potential benefits, and the equally real dangers to look out for?
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