for blind persons, the Internet is a tremendous resource.  However, as
the article vividly illustrates, it can easily be overused and there is a
much broader and deeper pool of resources if not offline or at least
paying a certain fee online.

Kelly

Washington Post

Point. Click. Think?

As Students Rely on the Internet for Research,  Teachers Try to Warn of
the Web's Snares

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, July 16,  2002; Page C01

It is 2 a.m. and Daniel Davis, a University of Maryland freshman, has not
even started his English paper on biological warfare, due that day.

No problem. He'll just do what he has done before a dozen times or more.
He sits down at his computer in his dorm room, signs on to Yahoo's search
engine and begins his quest. Six hours and several bags of chips later,
the paper pops out of his printer, complete.

He doesn't consider visiting the campus library or opening a book. Why
should he? "You can find whole pages of stuff you need to know on the
Web, fast," he says.

So Davis is a procrastinator. So what? Professors are used to that. But
six hours? That's a whole new kind of extreme.

Welcome to the world of Net thinking, a form of reasoning that
characterizes many students who are growing up with the Internet as their
primary, and in some cases, sole source of research. Ask teachers and
they'll tell you: Among all the influences that shape young thinking
skills, computer technology is the biggest one.

"Students' first recourse for any kind of information is the Web. It's
absolutely automatic," says Kenneth Kotovsky, a psychology professor at
Carnegie-Mellon University who has examined the study habits of young
people.

Good? Bad? Who knows? The first popular Internet browser, Netscape, came
out only about a decade ago. What we do know after millennia of training
minds in scholarly disciplines is that something has changed and it's not
apt to change back.

On the good side, Net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make
connections easily. "They are more in control of facts than we were 40
years ago," says Bernard Cooperman, a history professor at the University
of Maryland.

But they also value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over
depth, and other people's arguments over their own.

This has educators worried.

"Seven years ago, I was writing about the promise of digital resources,"
says Jamie McKenzie, a former school superintendent and library director
who now publishes an e-zine on educational technology. "I have to say
I've been disappointed. The quality of information [on the Internet] is
below what you find in print, and the Internet has fostered a thinner,
less substantial thinking."

The problem is no longer plagiarism of huge downloaded blocks of text --
software can detect that now, when a teacher enters a few lines of a
paper. The concern is the Internet itself.

Marylaine Block, a librarian and Internet trainer in Iowa, is blunt: "The
Internet makes it ungodly easy now for people who wish to be lazy."

In the Shallows

Jeffrey Meikle, chairman of the American studies department at the
University of Texas, sees the new world every time he walks into the main
library on the Austin campus. There, where the card catalogue used to be,
sit banks of computer terminals.

"My students are as intelligent and hardworking as ever," he says, "but
they wouldn't go to the library if there weren't all those terminals."

All Web resources are not equal, of course.

What aficionados call "the deep Web," including subscription services
such as Nexis and JSTOR, enables students to find information that is
accurate, thorough and wide-ranging.

"I think the Internet encourages intellectual thinking," says Nora Flynn,
a junior at Maryland. "You can go to so many sources, find things you
never heard of. It forces me to think globally."

But many students don't have access to these costly, sophisticated
resources or don't know how to use them. This leaves them relying on the
free Web, a dangerous place to be without a guide.

Anyone can post anything on the free Web, and anyone frequently does. A
student who typed "Thomas Jefferson" into the Google search engine would
get 1.29 million hits; rap star Eminem would bring up 1.37 million.
Narrowing one's search to certain words may not help. The gamelike
quality of screen and mouse encourages students to sample these sources
rather than select an appropriate text and read deeply into it or follow
an argument to its conclusion. The result is what Cooperman, who teaches
both Davis and Flynn at Maryland, calls "cocktail-party knowledge."

He's the model of a man of books: short-sleeve shirts, glasses, slight
stoop, a pensive air. "The Web is designed for the masses," he says. "It
never presents students with classically constructed arguments, just
facts and pictures." Many students today will advance an argument, he
continues, then find themselves unable to make it convincingly. "Is that
a function of the Web, or being inundated with information, or the way
we're educating them in general?"

Entering the Web

If students cannot come up with their own ideas, cut-and-paste technology
allows them to lift someone else's sentences or phrases with ease.

Jeana Davis, a ninth-grade teacher in Arlington, says students frequently
don't see anything wrong with this. "They'll say, 'I changed the words
around.' And I'll say, 'But it's not your original thought.' "

Superficial searching habits can have tragic consequences, illustrated
last year at Johns Hopkins University. A physician-researcher performed a
test of lung function on a healthy 24-year-old woman, administering a
large dose of a particular chemical. The woman then died of lung and
kidney failure. The doctor had searched online for information about the
drug but had failed to turn up any literature warning of its dangers --
information that medical librarians later did find online after the woman
died.

Students can avoid such mistakes by asking for help from those trained to
give it, but some young inquirers say they've done that and are merely
waved over to the digital section of a library. Librarian Marylaine Block
concedes that can happen, particularly since staff positions at many
libraries have been cut.

Bonnie Kunzel, teen specialist at the Princeton Public Library, says
students "will walk into our library and spend 30 minutes on the Internet
trying to find out how a cobbler worked in Colonial America. I'll walk
over and ask, 'Want to try a book now?' "

When students do come across something of interest, they may not be able
to detect the author's bias because Web prose, unlike the writing in
serious books and journals, often appears with only the slimmest of
attribution, if any. This can introduce a certain naivete into their
writing.

The Net has a kind of magical quality that leads younger students to say
to librarians such as Block, "It has to be true. If it weren't true, they
wouldn't let it be there." Says Block, "I have to tell them there is no
'they.' "

History teacher Davis, at Washington-Lee High School, recalls sitting
down at the computer with a student who was researching Christopher
Columbus's effect on the Americas. The student had found a convincing
essay by an author taking Columbus to task for his treatment of Native
Americans.

"Then we found another essay contradicting that," Davis says. "I asked
the student, 'Who is right?' He couldn't tell, and neither could I."

Teachers like Davis spend class time teaching their Net thinkers how to
read and think more critically. "I tell them, 'Don't take any Web site
for granted. Who was the author? What authority does he or she have? Does
the author have an agenda?' "

Maryland's Cooperman engaged a group of summer school students in a
similar discussion earlier this month. The course was titled "History of
the Jews I" and covered the period from the Bible through the Middle
Ages.

Find a scholarly article on an issue in Jewish history, he told the
students, suggesting that the best way to do that would be to visit the
campus library and "touch books."

After receiving teacher approval of their articles, Cooperman's students
summarized and evaluated the articles' arguments and then used the Web to
find further sources. Cooperman told them to evaluate the usefulness of
the Web sources compared with the scholarly material.

Their Web work turned up contradictions, errors and extraneous material.
Nora Flynn, exploring the female Talmudic scholar Beruriah, noted in
class that the scholarly article talked about Beruriah as a late
invention, a composite of several women scholars. Web sources that she
found through the popular search engine Google referred to Beruriah as
one woman, she said.

Student Lauren Steely said the Internet sites he looked at presented lots
of facts but got the dates wrong. Amy Newman, researching anti-Semitism
in Europe at the time of the Black Death, brought up more than 2,000
sites on Google, "but the first 30 were useless. Just poems and songs.
Then there was one story that looked like a kindergartner had written
it."

"Or maybe it was a basketball player from Duke," Cooperman quipped,
drawing a laugh from everybody who roots against Maryland's arch-rival.

Daniel Davis noted that several popular search engines place at the top
of their lists the sources that have paid them the most money. This would
be like a library prominently displaying only those books whose
publishers paid for the privilege, and Davis knows it. But it doesn't
stop him from using those search engines.

It only makes him, and young people like him, skeptical about information
sources wherever they're found, including books.

"College students are quite aware that they can't trust what they read,"
says Meikle at Texas. "They're drawn to sites that are ironic or
sarcastic, poking fun at perceived truths."

Not that long ago, Meikle continues, a person who wrote a book was
assumed to be an authority. "Now, when anybody can have a Web site on any
topic, then everybody is an expert, which means nobody is."

Cooperman says this is not necessarily a good thing for students. They
"assume everyone is a liar." Shallow thinking is one result, he says.
Another is the unwillingness among some students to take a strong
position themselves lest they be battered by classmates for their ideas.

Students who are not urged to "touch books" often don't realize how much
information is not on the Internet. According to Block, only about 15
percent of all information -- books, periodicals, government documents --
is found there. The full texts of articles from most academic journals,
for example, are not online nor are most current books. Because of
copyright laws, a lot of information may never make it to the Net, Block
says, which is why she and other librarians worry about lawmakers who
slash library budgets or propose eliminating libraries altogether,
saying, "Why do we need them? Everything's on the Internet."

And so the problem feeds on itself, encouraged by legislators.

Net Gains

Even the most vocal Net critics say it has aided learning in some ways.
Students no longer have to wrestle with microfilm machines or wait at the
circulation desk for books placed on reserve. Instead, they wander
through the information landscape. Jamie McKenzie calls them "free-range
students." Philosopher John Dewey, the proponent of student-driven
education, would be proud.

Allison Druin, an education professor who runs the human-computer
interaction lab at Maryland, says even younger children can create
something new on their own Web sites. In her laboratory, children ages 7
to 11 work with professors designing software that kids their age can use
when querying the Internet.

"The Internet is a tool, but it's also something they can make an
addition to," says Druin. "That's pretty powerful stuff for a kid."

"I see kids much more able to construct on their own," she continues.
"They used to look at us and ask, 'What's our next step?' Now we say,
'Here's the goal, here are our resources, here's our timeline,' and they
take off.'"

Meikle, at the University of Texas, observes the same phenomenon. His
best undergraduates come up with new takes on old subjects as quickly as
graduate students did years ago, he says. "I don't think you can come up
with something original unless you have an array of things to look at,
and the Internet certainly gives you that," he says. "It isn't collaging,
it's building something new."

Book Learnin'

One would like to think that this self-confidence and creativity will
produce adult citizens eager to participate in society and tackle its
problems.

When Jeana Davis at Washington-Lee makes an assignment, she directs
students to Web sites they might not know about but that she has already
approved. If students want to use another site, they must win Davis's
approval.

She requires students to use at least three books on any assignment, not
including encyclopedias. She checks their work during each project,
looking for originality and depth.

Cooperman at Maryland suggests books, first, to any student who asks him
for help. He also offers extra credit to students who do research in the
library, according to Daniel Davis, who likes getting bonus points for
doing what students took for granted only a decade ago.

"Sitting in the library is a lot better than sitting on the Internet," he
says, even though he's not exactly a frequent visitor to the main campus
library. "If you go into the library, you have to take apart a topic and
you become sort of an expert. Sitting on the Internet you don't actually
learn anything."

The place he does visit, as a music major, is the performing arts
library. "I can sit for hours there looking at books and things, with no
particular goal in mind."

That's post-Net thinking, says McKenzie, a realization that digital is
not enough, that grazing is good, but great ideas require deep reading,
incubation and contemplation. He believes today's students are headed in
that direction if grown-ups take seriously their assigning, as well as
advising, role.

"For decades we've been doing topical research," he complains. "Schools
say, 'Go find out all about Molly Pitcher.' That's an invitation to scoop
it up, to write stuff they already know. We should be encouraging kids to
research the difficult truth. Let's tell them a woman has been diagnosed
with breast cancer and has five doctors recommending different
treatments. What would they do?"

But do school systems really want students using the same tools to
question current proprieties and conventional wisdom? Teach kids to be
critical thinkers and they'll be sending it right back at the teacher in
the classroom.

There is much to worry about.

Up to a point. Libraries have a longstanding appeal that goes beyond the
antique, baby's-breath smell of books and the sense of exploration,
spelunking through the stacks. Few students can get through college
untouched by this experience, whether they know it or not.

"There's something in a library that makes you feel like an
intellectual," said Amy Newman. "You can wear glasses, look like Dr.
Cooperman. When you read, the books have such nice writing."


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html