[Discussion] (no subject)

[Paksoy, Hb]

Point. Click. Think? 
As Students Rely on the Internet for Research, Teachers Try to Warn of the
Web's Snares 
  "The Internet makes it ungodly easy now for people who wish to be lazy,"
says one librarian and Internet trainer. Here, a New York University student
downloads files. (Spencer Platt - Getty Images/File Photo) 
 

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."


© 2002 The Washington Post Company