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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.
Net thinkers at school appear to value breadth over depth and other peoples
arguments over their own,
"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.
"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 game like 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 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."