I remember doing a report (1984 or so) on the history of blindness and how the blind were treated....it took me four weeks. Today, it would take me an hour to obtain the same information and write about it, especially if I had a laptop as most high school students in the U.S. do, from what I understand. I wonder how this "faster" processing of lots of information affects the kids?

Yeah, in college I could pretty much write all my papers in 3 days. One day to look for books in the online catalogue and google book search, then to go down to the physical library if I really, really needed to; the next day do a slapdash article review on an online database (and ignore any articles that weren't available electronically); and third day to write.

I can't even imagine writing one of those old middle school topic papers today - just print out Wikipedia and you're done.

Hah! I could go on and on with this topic. I was in the main Berkeley library (I didn't go to Berkeley, I just happened to be studying there at the time), and I needed to find out the ten most profitable privately held South American corporations in the 1980's. Now, that represents quite a search even today on teh intertubes, but I spent an ENTIRE AFTERNOON hunting down the books that could provide me with that information. I was proud of my accomplishment when I got it done. I even wrote it out by hand.
Ooh, ooh! How about the comparative urban planning paper I wrote as an undergrad? That took weeks to research properly!
My husband and I reminisce fondly about the 'good old days' of research. We can't wait to tell our grandchildren about what life was like before the internet.

The first way that it affects the kids is that they first search for a paper online that they could use to avoid writing the paper in the first place and then paste that into a word processor and turn it in and are surprised when their teacher turns them in for plagiarism.

After that happens a few times, the kids will then take whatever things that google spits out and build their paper strictly by copy/paste probably without reading and definitely without understanding what they're putting together, producing a disjoint mass with no coherent organization, no thesis (or no consistent support for their thesis) and no conclusions.

The really amusing papers are the ones from kids who don't stop to question the source and end up with laughably wrong information.

Another side-effect separate from research papers are the kids who think that Babelfish is a good enough translator to do their French/Spanish homework for them. Oh. My. God. When I was teaching, the French teacher (close to retirement) didn't know about Babelfish and she was showing me work that was typical of several of her students. I showed how the kids got where they did, and subsequently ruined their year (they thought they could do their homework this way) and required them to --I know this is crazy--learn a skill.

I remember in HS that we were forced to do all of our citations on index cards. Which rapidly became very frustrating, trying to handwrite long ass URLs. (This was around 2000ish.)

I believe the index card thing was tossed the next year because everyone was using various other citation-storage thingys.

Plinth is right. In many ways, the easy availability of information is no boon to those who don't know how to sort it, evaluate it, criticize it, or work with it.

My husband and I reminisce fondly about the 'good old days' of research. We can't wait to tell our grandchildren about what life was like before the internet.

I think about this a lot, too (being in the "early immigrant" generation), but it is precisely the abilities we learned and use to research papers in libraries, find information, and construct arguments that created the treasure trove which the internet is. Without the skills of mental organization and evaluation, we wouldn't have a very useful internet. The theory underlying Google, Wikipedia, WordSpy, etc, and any number of reference pages is pure analog research; and the internet seems to be pretty genius at aggregating and dispensing information, but not so much at creating new information. The content on sites like, I dunno, WordSpy or the Library of Congress mostly predates the internet - the internet is just an incredibly awesome finding aid. However, if our brains aren't taught to use information, it's just a lot of pretty pages.

Information literacy was always something that needed to be part of school curricula (we called it "Library Skills" or "Research Methods" but it's even more vital now that information is so easy to find, and so much of it is so unreliable.

You know where I feel it most? This is sort of silly, but I used to hunt for songs like crazy when I first became a big music fan at the age of 11 or 12. I'd hear a song on the radio with no ID, and begin a quest. Usually this meant singing part of it to everyone I knew, and/or going down to the local record store and actually flipping through every record in the bins of artists who it might conceivably have been, checking titles to see if they might conceivably be that song, and/or calling the radio station up for an ID. It was always quite a project and there were some songs it took me years to ID (one Joe Walsh song in particular).

Last winter while going through papers I finally threw out my college notes, which I had hung onto since college. Why? Because I read them over (American Lit..transcendentalists...synecdoche...Sinners in the Hands etc...) and realized there was not a single thing contained in those notes about which I could not immediately re-educate myself on the internet.

Along with the difficulty of doing research, we had to type the damn papers on typewriters with no correction other than whiteout. My freshman year at Penn State in 1982, I didn't have a typewriter of my own so I had to use one of the coin operated selectrics in the library. I think that you got 1/2 an hour per quarter. You had to sit there with your pocket dictionary and Strunk and White and a packet of correction strips for your inevitable typing errors.

Oh, the good old days! Miko, you make an excellent point about having been hammered with good researching skills. My son and his cohort have not been taught (and alas, we are not making much headway with him ourselves) how to properly organize and conceptualize research topics. Information literacy is certainly behind the times in the school system (at least ours).
I also relate to your quest to find a song that you liked as a youngster. I remember hovering over my tape deck/radio, poised to hit the 'record' button as soon as a song came on that I liked. Nowadays, if I hear a song that I like, and I don't happen to be in front of my computer (which is rare), I memorize a few snippets of lyrics, then punch it into a song lyric database. Then I download it from iTunes, that simple. If I can't find it, I just ask metafilter. Whee!

Remember the Periodical Journal? Huge green books that listed like every magazine article ever? And you had to go through them one by one, searching at the big desk near their shelf and finally fill out a request slip asking for a copy of the January 1954 Apollo and then the librarian would bring the bound 1954 Apollos up on a cart and they smelled faintly musty and had weird old black and white ads and articles using words that don't exist anymore and you would sit there, reading what somebody wrote about a certain red figure vase or Pollack exhibition from long, long ago, thinking about how they were probably dead by now.

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature! God, yeah, I remember doing that. They're digital too, now.

Miko, you are so right, as always. On the one hand, I can't believe I ever learned anyting. On the other, as plinth says, for whatever reason, the papers I've seen from HS students today really lack organization and focus, for the most part.

And hey, another good thing about college libraries? The Stacks. You know what I'm talking about.

I do miss spending days on end in the peace and cool of the library, focussing on one topic. Being able to do almost all of the preliminary research at home has stopped the library being second home.

I love having access to movies and music - things I'd only ever dreamed of seeing when I was a kid, like The Holy Mountain, I can find without too much trouble at all. I love that.

The Stacks. You know what I'm talking about.
Hee hee!

Except ours had these motion-sensor lights for energy efficiency. If you didn't move for a while they'd go out, but if you rustled again, they'd blaze back on. Shocker!