At the University of Brighton, Professor Tara Brabazon has taken it upon herself to purge the classroom of the likes of Wikipedia and Google, saying that, "Too many students don't use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis." Apparently, the work of students has been "banal" as a result of search engines - which caused her to ban them altogether in her classes.

Her reasoning is probably grounded in what may be a real problem: that sites like Google and Wikipedia do make it easier to throw things together, and that indeed, the convenience these sites provide may cause students to not put in as much effort into researching projects as they would if they did not have these resources.

Call us old fashioned if you will, but banning things generally doesn't really solve problems. If she really needs higher quality work, as Robert Scoble pointed out, she should raise the standard for her grading criteria. It's highly unlikely that students will be more motivated to work harder just because they are denied using Google and Wikipedia in their coursework.

Then again, she might just be saying these things to get a rise out of people and some nice PR for her speaking gig, "Google Is White Bread For The Mind." Yes, and banning access to resources in an attempt to get students to produce better work is, like what, whole wheat?

[via Techmeme]

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn't really my scene, but here's a handy tool if you have a sneaking suspicion that your web site has been banned from Google search results: Google Ban Checker. It's a free Windows app that will take a list of web sites and see if they're indexed by Google. On top of that, it will crawl your site(s) and check all of your outbound links to see if you're linking to any sites banned by Google, which can damage your pagerank. The app is intended for small to medium-sized web sites and is a little barebones, but every little bit helps, right?