In five years of undergraduate and eight years of graduate school, I have had a lot of teachers. The mix is what you might expect: some lousy teachers who never prepared, some mediocre teachers who tried their best but were better researchers than teachers, and plenty of great teachers who erred on the side of being overprepared and inspired their students to do the same.
In my memory, the greatest teacher of them all was Myron Anderson, a titan among teachers at tiny St. Cloud State University, where I completed my undergraduate degree while (briefly) preparing for the seminary. My peers and I called him the Mighty Myron, because he worked harder--and we worked harder for him--than any teacher we had ever had.
Myron was always in his office, which was a mountain of books with a cave carved out of it for a desk and a computer. I'm told his home is similar. In either place, he could find any passage in any book in the collection in less than five minutes. More than any single thing, he was the ultimate resource, often lending us books from his collection, complete with heavy underlining of the important passages. The skill I attribute most to Myron's influence is my ability to do book research outside of his collection. And I wonder what will happen to our society when this skill is all but obsolete--when a savvy researcher can find almost anything on the Web.
As we prepare our annual Computing in Education issue, I often think about Myron's influence on my life and wonder if his style of learning and teaching is going the way of the dinosaur. It is a sad thing for me to consider: While it is a lot more efficient to find information on the Web, there is an emptiness about the results of a successful search. Instant gratification replaces the hard-won gold bar of truth found in the vast vaults of libraries.
And I can't help but think of the consequences of the obsolescence of libraries for the leaders of tomorrow. With library research, finding the information you need for a project determines the success of the project; searches can be exhausting and invigorating. The search itself often results in unexpected discoveries that the wise researcher files away for future projects. And, the search as often invalidates a point of view as it validates. In poring over vast quantities of information, you are more likely to find alternative points of view that enhance your own picture of the true nature of things.
In contrast, the skilled Web researcher asks the various engines, crawlers, and directories to find specific pieces of information that support her assumptions. While it is desirable to find alternate points of view, the natural tendency is not to look for them, especially with the expectations that researchers can turn around projects faster with the Web. Accidental discoveries do happen, but they are more rare on the Web. And as search technologies continue to improve, these discoveries will all but go away.
The old libraries also force researchers to dig deeper into material to find what they need. In doing so, learners develop a more sophisticated understanding of the material. Unlike with Myron's lent texts, the important passages are not underlined. Those books that have been defaced are as often underlined for completely different reasons. So researchers ignore the underlining and read about a great many nuances of the subject in the search for that perfect passage to use in a project.
The Web, on the other hand, encourages the reading of abstracts and other digested forms of research. Again, just as word processing changed our expectations of the quality of output, the Web changes our expectations on the quantity. That is, people expect us to turn projects around much more quickly, knowing that we can find the information we need on the Web. Given these pressures, there's no time to read about subtle details and hidden variables. Just get the overview and move on to the next topic. This is the problem pointed out so well in last month's Pursuits column.
On the plus side, the Web enables us to be generalists. With library research, there really is only enough time for us to master one subject. Myron's mastery of philosophy required him to read constantly 18/7. With the Web, we may not master any one subject, but we can get a pretty good overview of all of them. Indeed, the existence of the Web favors generalists--those who are willing to learn on any subject that suits the needs of the day, rather than attaining mastery of a single subject area.
Teachers in the world of the Web are faced with some daunting challenges. Most of them take the form of balancing acts between new and old ways of learning. We want students to learn to find information on all sides of an issue and to learn some of its complexities, and we must temper our expectations of project turnaround as a result. We want students to learn a vast variety of subjects, but we also need them to master at least one.
My hope in writing this column is that teachers keep these balances in mind as they design curriculum in the future. I hope teachers don't abandon the dusty shelves of books in favor of all-Web methods. Rather, use the two to complement one another. The Web can be a good source of quick overviews; the library is necessary for depth. Above all, don't forget the Mighty Myron's legacy: There is gold in them thar mountains of books!
James Mathewson is editorial director of ComputerUser.com Inc.
