The Use Of Internet In Enhancing Academic Research Writing

Donald LUKMAN
4 min readOct 23, 2024

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At the writing stage, Internet-based technologies have been found to engage students in collaborative writing, allowing writing to be a socially constructed activity. The tools (e.g., wikis, whiteboards, online chat rooms and MOOC meetings) provide page-like spaces for interacting and some (e.g., whiteboards) add features for importing texts, graphical markers and tools.

See Samples Of Undergraduate Project Topics & MBA Research Materials For College Students

In this way, both the instructor and peers encourage topic development by increasing target language production, while Web tools promote increased audience awareness, attention to the content of the communication and its linguistic form, evolution of ideas, a greater degree of sophistication of peers’ comments and reorganization of content.

INTERNET

the internet is described as a worldwide computer network which connects local networks using the packet-switched communication protocol TCP/IP and has uniform rules for addressing and naming nodes (computers connected to the network) and protocols for sharing information. In the computer science definition, the internet is a space of IP addresses allocated to hosts and servers connected by network devices, such as network cards, hubs, and modems, which communicate via the Internet Protocol (IP) using communications infrastructure. The internet is a global system of connections between computers, which allows people to communicate with one another and find information on the World Wide Web using visuals, sounds, and text in a way that escapes time and space and the cost limitations of distance — and also the control of territorial governments. The internet is a rapidly growing worldwide system of interconnected computer networks. It offers many services, such as remote user login, file transfer, e-mail, and newsgroups. Each computer connected to the internet has its own uniquely assigned number, which is an address. The uniqueness of the internet as the dominant medium of today consists in its bringing together the functions of all media: it can influence users through images, sound, words or animation, as well as through other perception techniques.

RESEARCH WRITING

Research writing being the major and crucial type of academics demands more attention as it not only presents the facts, findings and observations but also demands critical evaluation. The main objective of organizing research writing is to allow the audience to read one’s work selectively. When one researches a topic, one may be interested in just the methods, a specific result, the interpretation, or perhaps one just want to see a summary of the paper to determine if it is relevant to one’s study or not. Thus disciplinarity becomes one of the important characteristic of research paper writing. Disciplinarity is one of the most important features of academic study, research and writing. Disciplinarity is constructed by published writing in one’s discipline. One’s sense of disciplinarity is shaped by one’s understanding not only of research but also of how research is presented in journals and more importantly how the case for contribution to the discipline is constructed in writing. If one wants to write in a specific discipline one needs to establish what constitutes disciplinarity in one’s area and more specifically how that is represented in published writing in one’s field at that time. This approach is rhetorical, in the sense that it involves analyzing features of texts and considering the audiences and purposes of Academic Writing. Writing in a discipline means either using rhetorical features or as writers one has to assimilate those features in one’s thinking and writing. The importance of understanding the academic discipline within which one works and writes is important. Moreover how disciplinarity can be understood in terms of the features of academic writing that currently appear on published form in one’s discipline.

THE INTERNET AND RESEARCH WRITING NEXUS

The internet has been defined as the communication superhighway that links, hooks, and transforms the entire world into a global village where a different individual can easily get in touch, see, or speak to one another, as well as exchange information instantaneously from one point of the globe to another. Like in any other higher institution of learning around the globe, Nigerian university undergraduate students are often required to conduct diverse research work as they progress through their final year. The qualities of a student’s research and learning are largely dependent on the quality, quantity and current internet resources referred to. This has attracted research debate on the use of internet in contemporary educational contexts in developing countries such as Nigeria. However, most of these studies predominantly highlight its impact on academic performance (grades), communication, and general educational purposes. This indicates that detailed studies that try to interpret student perspective on internet access and usefulness for research and academic learning are still in their embryonic phase. It is worthwhile to mention that most of these documented researches based merely on students within Southern, Eastern and Western. This strong focus has led to a limited research conducted among students’ in the North-Eastern part which is amid slower technological change. This backdrop provides a scope for an in-depth research into the students’ experience and perspective on the access and utility of electronic sources for academic research and learning. Thus, it is pertinent to research into how these students find ways to make use of the internet to facilitate their academic research and learning. This also calls for exploring the challenges facing the students in this region as it relates to internet usage for academic research and learning. Research evidence has shown that the advances in information technology and the development of computers have affected student approaches to research and learning in the contemporary higher educational settings. Several studies have supported that the internet utilization is most prevalent among younger, educated individuals

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