:Connecting the Dots

The motto of Carmun is “students of the world unite!” This is not the kind of motto that is going to set teachers’ minds at ease as they click their way through the site. Too bad. The idea behind Carmun is a very noble one: offer students with similar academic interests a place to share ideas and sources.

Once you sign up for a free Carmun account, you can start or join groups focused on academic themes like Celtic Studies, Economics, and Feminism. Group members then have access to a threaded discussion forum where they can talk about the topic and where they share and manage a database of sources relating to it. Users can upload bibliographies of their projects, complete with ratings and reviews, for other members of the group to view. There is even a link to locate the work in your local library.

So basically, Carmun is a social networking site for study groups.  It’s MySpace for the late-night library set.  Its founder, Jonathan Edson, created the site when he found that life in graduate school was lonely compared to his experience in the corporate world, where “collaboration is necessary and expected.” Especially in the case of more esoteric topics, Carmun will give students the opportunity to connect with others who share their research interests and in the process, to unearth sources that they weren’t aware of before.

Yet in my mind I already hear the teachers complaining: “They need to do their own research! This is cheating! I want them to learn to do research in the library on their own! This is just like sharing term papers!” And perhaps there’s some validity to those concerns. At what point does collaboration become cheating? Especially in the primary and secondary grades, where the process of research is perhaps more important than the product, will a tool like Carmun become a crutch for the chronic procrastinator who has waited until the last minute and needs to circumvent the usual search routine - or worse, decides to use Carmun to pad a skimpy Works Cited page?

Does research have to be the lonely and isolating experience that it always has been in schools? Is that model still valid given the realities of our new, “flat” world? I don’t know. I like the idea behind Carmun but I’ve yet to mention it to the teachers in my district’s high school. “Students of the world unite!” may be a hard pill for them - and me - to swallow.