Point. Click. Think?
By Laura Sessions Stepp
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 yearsago," 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 aro