Online MLA Tools

I'm currently subbing in an English department near me. Just before the winter break, I taught a lesson about how to make an MLA works cited page. When I first started teaching, only six or so years ago, 11th grade English had a min-unit about how to do this. At the end of the unit, students were given various sources to document on as a formal assessment. Today, students have Easy Bib and Citation Machine. In about 30 minutes, I walked students through the book entry for their novel, which included a few idiosyncrasies. Most students now have the ability to create a works cited entry for almost any source. No manual needed, no memorization. The student does still need to double-check formatting and accuracy, but the "heavy lifting" is done for them.

Easier still, when students use articles from research tools like EBSCO and Proquest, they can select which style guide they need to use and the site will generate their works cited entry for them. With a fairly small amount of work on their end, the student has all of the relevant data, in the right format, ready to use almost instantly. I'm of two minds about this.

One side thinks that students are currently able to correctly document their research in an easy and quick manner. These online tools take the guess work out of documentation and reduce the amount of time needed to complete the task. Rather than skipping the assignment, students just have to do a little bit of copying and pasting and they're done!

The other side worries that the limited need to actually learn the type of information needed for documenting your sources will result in a limited understanding of the values and relevance of the publication information. If you don't need to find the date of publication, are you really thinking about the currency of the information? Teaching critical thinking is and has been one of the greatest on-going challenges of the English discipline, but it has been added by the exploration of source documentation.

On a related note, we teach students to document sources because of the importance of intellectual property. We teach students to give credit to the creator of the ideas. Do online tools enhance the value of this lesson or limit it? Food for thought.