Does the Internet change our basic values?

I’ve just read a story on a blog at www.reynaelena.com about a teacher blaming her for students copying and pasting a post on her blog. It makes me wonder what right does the teacher have to go on blaming the site for what the students did.

There was a time that the Internet has not been part of our lives, when we had to rely on books to create our assignments and school work. There will always be students that rather than use their minds, they would just copy verbatim what they find — whether they were printed in books or found on the Internet.

Now you don’t go around blaming the author of a book about students copying things as is? So why blame the Internet if students copy things as is?

We should be teaching our children the values that since information is now more available that they should use it to help them explore more and learn more rather than just copy more. Basic values are what makes people, not technology.