Writing about earlier changes in technology that have transformed human relationships to knowledge, information, and lived experience, Walter Ong continually insists that each change has transformed not only one's experience of the world but also one's sense of the technology that preceded it. As someone who is being led ever so reluctantly by increasingly savvy students and Fogler's amazingly knowledgeable research librarians into the world of computer-based research, I can only affirm Ong's premise. Light years away from really understanding what the Internet can let us do, my experience with it so far has made me all the more respectful of the print-based culture in which I learned to do research. The values and assumptions implicit in the work of that culture seem to me more and more necessary if one is to situate oneself responsibly amid the amazing riches that computers make available.

About twelve years ago when I had only the foggiest idea of what a computer search was, I unthinkingly required a class of seniors to spend a week investigating one of several topics central to the work we were doing. I named the journals I thought would prove helpful and asked them to just read around and come to class with brief summaries of three or four important articles. I was not prepared when several students appeared in class with small telephone book-sized stacks of paper, the products of a few hours in the library having a computer see what summaries it could find for the topic they had chosen. Incredulous, I asked how many of the articles the students had had time to read. Just as incredulous, they did not understand my question. Summaries, after all, had been the requirement. Who would want to second guess a machine.

More recently, I was teaching a unit in a first-year writing class on the environment, and the students and I were reading a range of essays on the future of the planet. Some insisted that all talk of global warming was hyperbole; others offered dire predictions on the fate of the earth if substantial changes in individual and corporate lifestyles were not forthcoming. All were carefully researched. All attempted to acknowledge and counter views opposite to their own. The students and I read and talked, and then they began to write their own positions on the issue. Additional research, I said, was fine but not necessary. One student, the proud owner of an ATV who had not been pleased at what he kept calling the "slams" several of our authors were making at automotive companies, spent much time searching the web until he found the information he needed to set us all straight. Quoting only from the home pages of major automotive companies, the student composed an essay to convince us that automobiles were in no way responsible for harming the environment and that automotive companies were doing important research to improve the world for everyone. When I asked him to critique his sources, to speculate on what might have been the purposes implicit in the web pages, he looked baffled. He had been doing research on the web for years he assured me; his technique had not changed. You look until you find what proves your point and then you stop.

Though extreme, these cautionary tales are indeed true and, at least for me, instructive of the differences that exist between the web-based world of nearly endless possibilities and the contextually limited world in which a print-based culture does its work. My assignments, I now realize, were naïve. In asking both for a selective review of the literature and for a response to assigned essays, I was asking students to make judgments, to read, reason, synthesize, and decide what mattered most in their thinking about assigned topics. The web, I came to

understand, had saved them, probably not for the first time, because it made judgment seem unnecessary: use all you can find, keep looking until your prejudgments are affirmed. My students were surely not the first beginning researchers trying to avoid judgment calls; one reason MA theses and PhD dissertations take so long must be that claiming authority is hard and a bit frightening. With traditional research, though, the kinds of judgments one needs to make are usually obvious in the materials one is reading. That's not necessarily true any more.

And it is at precisely this juncture that Ong's premise seems most true. Precisely because the new technology seems to ignore judgment and context, I am increasingly aware of the role they play in any act of research. We can hardly ignore the Internet. We owe our students direction about what sites are likely to prove useful for particular projects. But at the same time, we need to keep insisting that students read, talk, and write about the questions or issues that have been focal for a profession or field and then work to define and resolve such questions for themselves and like-minded peers. With enough such practice, they should gain a sense of careful inquiry that will let them engage with profit information from all sources. My point here, I want to be clear, is not to stress existing disciplines. They will change; they are changing faster than ever. But the respect for context and sense of careful inquiry that work in a discipline is more important than it has ever been. Without thinkers who know from experience the role of human community and judgment in making sense of what's available, the Internet might take us anywhere.