In his post The sanctity of print Doug Johnson asks:

..is requiring print sources of information in a paper or project desirable, practical or effective in 2008?”

I understand why he asks the question. I agree – it is quality, not format that should matter the most.

But …. I confess.

I too have projects that require books. These projects came about in reaction to poor quality research papers based on poor quality web sources. So the requirement seemed like a good idea. After all, for many topics, the first 10 books you run across in a good school library collection are likely to provide higher quality, more objective information than the first 10 hits on Google.

Don’t believe me? Try it out.

Compare the gun control books in your library colletion to the first 10 results on Google. What do you discover?

What about cocaine? Have you looked at www.cocaine.org? It turns up in the first 5 results of every search engine I have tried.
And yet…I understand the argument. I too am ambivalent about the “you must use at least 1 book” requirement. I know I need to expand my teaching to include evaluating all formats – not just the web. Still – I have no immediate plans to abandon the requirement. I think it is important to push kids out of their comfort zone a little. And increasingly – that means pushing them to look further than their favorite search engine. Students are depending too much on “information bytes” and are increasingly unable to deal with the complex, multi-level arguments that are more often found in books.

Our school has been thinking about literacy a lot lately, thanks to our new literacy coach. The more I think about literacy and examine the techniques our coach recommends, the more I think the problem is not really “print vs. web.” Think back to the pre-internet world. Yes – there WAS life before Google. And guess what? Kids turned in bad research papers then too. Papers based on haphazard research – albeit using high quality library books. Indeed, it could be said that they were plagiarizing from higher quality sources back then.

No – the problem really is not web vs. print. The problem is literacy. The problem is the “instant access” – “good enough” – “cut and paste” mentality that the web encourages. We are all afflicted these days with I-ADHD (information attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). We stalk information, we hunt it down, we cut and paste it to read later. We bookmark it, we blog it, we save it in our del.icio.us accounts. Multiply that exponentially – and you see the problem that our students have.

They are great at gathering – but not so hot at interacting. They are terrific at building beautiful (and distracting) PowerPoints behind their information bytes. But they can’t summarize their findings in a few coherent sentences. They can’t pronounce many of the words in their own presentations.

What is missing?

Is it too many web sources and not enough book sources? I don’t think so. What’s missing is READING. What’s missing is THINKING. What’s missing is CREATING. Why?

Because…. the biggest thing missing is TIME (and skills) for DEEP READING.

We’d worry less about format if we gave kids more TIME. Time to interact with the information they have gathered. Requiring them to sit down, read, highlight, summarize and take notes will increase their understanding. Providing them with activities that force them to read actively and ask clarifying questions will increase the quality of their research. It will give them the chance to see whether the text is one-sided or lacking in depth. It will lead students to ask questions which will in turn lead them back to search for answers.

Of course we need to give the kids time to search – but more than that, we need to give them time to read. Some teachers might resist using library time to read. It’s a radical concept after all. Somehow we have fallen into the trap that library time = searching time. I think that is a mistake. Library time should be “understanding” time. The kids need time to think. Problem is – they don’t always know how to do that. They need their teachers and librarians by their sides to help them understand what they read. They need to get off that addictive searching treadmill and take a breather. They need to be still and listen to what they read.

Meanwhile – the “you must use at least 1 book” requirement is not really all bad. The kids sometimes groan about the requirement – but once they find a book they often settle down with it for some quiet time – away from the ever-dazzling, distracting lure of the web.

Besides – if worse comes to worse – I can always use the requirement to entice students into using our databases to locate ebooks!