Important: Translated automatically from Spanish by 🌐💬 Aphra 1.0.0
In my previous life as a student, the preparation of monographic works, both individual and group, went through several stages. In the first, we would go to the library (I’m sure this word sends shivers down many people’s spines) hoping to locate among the voluminous volumes some useful paragraph that we could copy manually. A little later, some privileged few of us were lucky enough to have some CDs labeled “Encarta”. If the topic wasn’t too complicated, they saved us a trip and the search was now performed by the computer itself. Otherwise, the dynamic was the same: locate the paragraph and copy it by hand. In the last stage, we already had access to the Internet. And with it, the greatest nightmare for teachers who assigned homework: Wikipedia. Of course, they managed to convince us that most of the information it contained was probably false. Because there: “Anyone could write”. It’s curious, because somehow for the first time we were forced to do something different. We knew that teachers would check the Wikipedia article, so it could be our source of information, but we had to slightly change the way of expressing the same thing, we could no longer copy a paragraph literally. Well, at least until El Rincón del Vago arrived. It seemed that the only solution available to avoid copy/paste was to make us do the work by hand instead of letting us use the computer. “This way we make sure they read the information at least once,” they might have thought. How beautiful and orderly a printed work looked! And how wonderful were the covers made with WordArt. The fact is that we were never taught to extract and manipulate information, or at least I don’t remember learning it in those stages. It was funny to see the textbooks of classmates, highlighted with “the most important”: Everything, except for determiners, prepositions, and some adverbs.
