How the Web Destroys the Quality of Students' Research Papers

By David Rothenberg

Sometimes I look forward to the end-of-semester rush, when students' final

papers come streaming into my office and mailbox. I could have hundreds of

pages of original thought to read and evaluate. Once in a while, it is truly

exciting, and brilliant words are typed across a page in response to a

question I've asked the class to discuss.

But this past semester was different. I noticed a disturbing decline in both

the quality of the writing and the originality of the thoughts expressed.

What had happened since last fall? Did I ask worse questions? Were my

students unusually lazy? No. My class had fallen victim to the latest easy

way of writing a paper: doing their research on the World-Wide Web.

It's easy to spot a research paper that is based primarily on information

collected from the Web. First, the bibliography cites no books, just

articles or pointers to places in that virtual land somewhere off any map:

http://www.etc. Then a strange preponderance of material in the bibliography

is curiously out of date. A lot of stuff on the Web that is advertised as

timely is actually at least a few years old. (One student submitted a

research paper last semester in which all of his sources were articles

published between September and December 1995; that was probably the time

span of the Web page on which he found them.)

Another clue is the beautiful pictures and graphs that are inserted neatly

into the body of the student's text. They look impressive, as though they

were the result of careful work and analysis, but actually they often bear

little relation to the precise subject of the paper. Cut and pasted from the

vast realm of what's out there for the taking, they masquerade as original

work.

Accompanying them are unattributed quotes (in which one can't tell who made

the statement or in what context) and curiously detailed references to the

kinds of things that are easy to find on the Web (pages and pages of federal

documents, corporate propaganda, or snippets of commentary by people whose

credibility is difficult to assess). Sadly, one finds few references to

careful, in-depth commentaries on the subject of the paper, the kind of

analysis that requires a book, rather than an article, for its full

development.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no neo-Luddite. I am as enchanted as anyone else by

the potential of this new technology to provide instant information. But too

much of what passes for information these days is simply advertising for

information. Screen after screen shows you where you can find out more, how

you can connect to this place or that. The acts of linking and networking

and randomly jumping from here to there become as exciting or rewarding as

actually finding anything of intellectual value.

Search engines, with their half-baked algorithms, are closer to slot

machines than to library catalogues. You throw your query to the wind, and

who knows what will come back to you? You may get 234,468 supposed

references to whatever you want to know. Perhaps one in a thousand might

actually help you. But it's easy to be sidetracked or frustrated as you try

to go through those Web pages one by one. Unfortunately, they're not

arranged in order of importance.

What I'm describing is the hunt-and-peck method of writing a paper. We all

know that word processing makes many first drafts look far more polished

than they are. If the paper doesn't reach the assigned five pages, readjust

the margin, change the font size, and ... voila! Of course, those

machinations take up time that the student could have spent revising the

paper. With programs to check one's spelling and grammar now standard

features on most computers, one wonders why students make any mistakes at

all. But errors are as prevalent as ever, no matter how crisp the typeface.

Instead of becoming perfectionists, too many students have become slackers,

preferring to let the machine do their work for them.

What the Web adds to the shortcuts made possible by word processing is to

make research look too easy. You toss a query to the machine, wait a few

minutes, and suddenly a lot of possible sources of information appear on

your screen. Instead of books that you have to check out of the library,

read carefully, understand, synthesize, and then tactfully excerpt, these

sources are quips, blips, pictures, and short summaries that may be

downloaded magically to the dorm-room computer screen. Fabulous! How simple!

The only problem is that a paper consisting of summaries of summaries is

bound to be fragmented and superficial, and to demonstrate more of a random

montage than an ability to sustain an argument through 10 to 15

double-spaced pages.

Of course, you can't blame the students for ignoring books. When college

libraries are diverting funds from books to computer technology that will be

obsolete in two years at most, they send a clear message to students: Don't

read, just connect. Surf. Download. Cut and paste. Originality becomes hard

to separate from plagiarism if no author is cited on a Web page. Clearly,

the words are up for grabs, and students much prefer the fabulous jumble to

the hard work of stopping to think and make sense of what they've read.

Libraries used to be repositories of words and ideas. Now they are seen as

centers for the retrieval of information. Some of this information comes

from other, bigger libraries, in the form of books that can take time to

obtain through interlibrary loan. What happens to the many students (some

things never change) who scramble to write a paper the night before it's

due? The computer screen, the gateway to the world sitting right on their

desks, promises instant access -- but actually offers only a pale,

two-dimensional version of a real library.

But it's also my fault. I take much of the blame for the decline in the

quality of student research in my classes. I need to teach students how to

read, to take time with language and ideas, to work through arguments, to

synthesize disparate sources to come up with original thought. I need to

help my students understand how to assess sources to determine their

credibility, as well as to trust their own ideas more than snippets of

thought that materialize on a screen. The placelessness of the Web leads to

an ethereal randomness of thought. Gone are the pathways of logic and

passion, the sense of the progress of an argument. Chance holds sway, and it

more often misses than hits. Judgment must be taught, as well as the methods

of exploration.

I'm seeing my students' attention spans wane and their ability to reason for

themselves decline. I wish that the university's computer system would crash

for a day, so that I could encourage them to go outside, sit under a tree,

and read a really good book -- from start to finish. I'd like them to sit

for a while and ponder what it means to live in a world where some things

get easier and easier so rapidly that we can hardly keep track of how easy

they're getting, while other tasks remain as hard as ever -- such as doing

research and writing a good paper that teaches the writer something in the

process. Knowledge does not emerge in a vacuum, but we do need silence and

space for sustained thought. Next semester, I'm going to urge my students to

turn off their glowing boxes and think, if only once in a while.

David Rothenberg is an associate professor of philosophy at the New Jersey

Institute of Technology. He is the author of Hand's End: Technology and the

Limits of Nature (University of California Press, 1993) and the editor of

Terra Nova: Journal of Nature and Culture (M.I.T. Press).

[Academe Today: This Week's Chronicle]

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Date: August 15, 1997

Section: Opinion

Page: A44

Back to the Main Critical Thinking Page