By Laura Sessions Stepp

It is 2 and Daniel Davis, a first-year University of Maryland student, 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.

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.

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 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."

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?"
The Net has kind of magical quality that leads younger students to say to
librarians such as Block, it has to be a true. If it werent true, they wouldnt let
it be there

Says Block, I have to tell them there is no they