Some critics of the World-Wide Web question its usefulness as a scholarly resource, especially for undergraduates, who may rely exclusively on it for their research. But the Web will continue to affect learning, and we believe that professors and librarians must take on the task of equipping students to examine the information available there critically. In assignments that we have given to our students asking them to use Web sites and other material in their research, we have not found that the Web has adversely affected the quality of their writing. Instead, we have found that the public nature of communication on the Web can help us teach students to be better readers, writers, and thinkers. Thus, the problems posed by the Web have become opportunities.
Many college students do find it a challenge to construct a complex argument, especially in writing.
But it is not just the Web that has taught them to think in sound bites. What has really changed with the advent of the Web is that students no longer get most of their information for class assignments from reputable print sources in the library. On the Web, scholarly resources, unfounded claims, and advertising are all mixed up together, and librarians have not assessed the information's reliability before students use it for assignments. Scholars and librarians clearly must organize material on the Web in better, more-usable ways for students and experts alike. To make reliable information in their fields easier to find, some academics have developed Web sites that include authoritative bibliographies, historical overviews, biographies, full texts of primary sources, photographs, and more.