Learn Without the Web

With Google and most other search engines, it’s all about instant relevance—delivering what users ask for; the speedier, the better. That’s why in 2005 Google began to personalize search results, responding to a current search by tracking past searches. The goal was to bring the desired information to the number-one spot on the first page of results. Google’s success was validated by AOL in August 2006 when it reported that for Google searches, a whopping 42 percent yielded a click on the top result. The second result dropped to 12 percent and the tenth to 3 percent. The total for the second page (each page includes 10 items) was only 10 percent.

That tiny percentage for items past the first five isn’t a measure of the superficial or itsy-bitsy nature of most queries. Rather, it shows how Google is efficient and serviceable, a direct and speedy aid to any curiosity. People who need a name, fact, title, reference… virtually anything on record… can find it without legwork, false leads, dead ends, or marginal clutter. Google itself says, “The lifespan of a Google query normally lasts less than half a second.” It connects minds with desired objects in an instant, assisting knowing and learning in ways inconceivable in the days of library card catalogs and thousand-page bibliographies in the reference room.

This explains why my students seemed lost when I imposed a restriction on a homework assignment two years ago. In a survey of American literature, I told them they had to submit an obituary of Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, or other major author, along with a paragraph summary of the piece. For each of them, the same thing happened: Go to a search engine, type in “mark twain obituary,” and something like a list of “selected obituaries” from the University of Virginia Library (http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/TwaObit.html) would appear. From here they could click on an item, say the April 22, 1910 edition of the Baltimore Sun, which presents lines of text apparently lifted from the original setting in that daily newspaper. The words were the same, but were now formatted as an abstract block with no historical markers.

When we returned to class, all the students received a “check” in the grade book for completing the assignment, but then came the tough part. “Okay, let’s do it again,” I said, “but this time you can’t use the Web. No Google, Bing, Yahoo, or even.pdf files in library databases.”

I moved quickly to the day’s reading, but the students didn’t follow, stuck on the assignment, eyes fixed and more than a few jaws hanging.

I looked around and said, “What?”

One in front mumbled, “What do you mean?”

“No Web. That a problem?”

More blank stares until someone took the bait.

“What’re we supposed to do?”

Others nodded in agreement.

I said, “You’re supposed to do what people did for decades before search engines came along.” Still no recognition on their faces; they didn’t know how research proceeded in such primitive pre-digital times. The search engine has proven so helpful and sufficient over the semesters that they never bothered with any other non-digital method. When it’s removed, they flounder.

I outlined the steps. Get the date of death from an encyclopedia or biography. Ask the reference librarian where to find old newspapers. Get help with the microfilm machine. It took 20 minutes to set up, a short procedure that should seem quick even for digital immigrants. But to the digital natives in the seats arrayed before me, it all sounded pointless and terribly time-consuming. When we can get it a-thousand-times faster, why bother with the old or indeed any other way?

Because, I tried to explain, sometimes the research experience is as important as the sought-after information itself. In this case, I was teaching my students to learn something without the Web and that the non-digital process could be an end in itself. The search engine carries students directly to the text. Microfilm carries them to a regular old paper-and-ink newspaper, where they must comb through issues and pages before reaching the obituary. Along the way, they read headlines, scan photographs and advertisements, and note op-eds. For instance, the Atlanta Constitution mourned Twain’s death in an editorial entitled “Mark Twain, World-Servant.” To find it, students scroll over the front page display of photos: the headquarters and officers of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a Paris banquet for ex-President Teddy Roosevelt, and the electric chair for a New York City 19-year-old man who tortured and killed a 15-year-old girl. One column provided updates on aristocrats in Europe headed “Old World Court Gossip,” and others covered a gathering of Confederate veterans in Mobile, AL, for the 45th anniversary of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and a memorial to Georgia physician Crawford Long, discoverer of anesthesia. Advertisements offered straw hats in preparation for a hot summer, dental work (“Gas and Vitalized Air for Painless Extraction”), Tetley’s Tea, and “The Medicinal Value of Whiskey.”

The collected stories and formats are presented in a historical context that the reader soaks up on the way toward the information goal. That’s exactly the point of the exercise. Slowing down isn’t inefficiency. It’s a learning process bypassed by Web searches. The methods represent contrasting goals. One treats coursework as information retrieval, the other as knowledge-building. Through the Web, students call up the object alone, add a quick summary, and turn it in. It happens so easily they barely remember the material a day later. They do, however, remember how to click, copy, and paste. On the old microfilm machine, students draw the object out of a rich historical setting, with the action lodging images, names, and topics in their heads. With more assignments like this during the semester, they leave the course with a stronger sense of the past, and, perhaps, of themselves.

Sad to say, most students don’t buy this rationale, even after they’ve had the experience. They’ve operated so long in information-retrieval mode that knowledge-building procedures only irritate them. Homework is painful enough without having to make a special trip to the library to complete it. Why do they have to build up historical knowledge when they can tap it as needed with a satisfying click.

This is the attitudinal side-effect of the Web for school: Digital denial of the “no pain, no gain” premise. Information comes so readily that cranking-up an even modest effort seems mean and cockamamie. Teachers should take note of the response and, if they care about the impressionable minds of their charges, regard it as a positive sign and require even more non-digital exercises. If they’re not complaining, they’re not working—or learning—hard enough.