Here’s something that worries me: students who rely on keyword searching as their sole research method.  Do we ever run out of things to worry about when it comes to teaching our children?  No.  That’s the nature of teaching and parenting.

I’m serious, I do worry.  I might be driving down one of our county roads or chowing down on cat fish and hushpuppies, when it hits me: what’s going to happen when the new generation raised on keywords comes of age without solid research methodology under their belts?

Here’s something else.  Writing for the internet is changing our style.  People have to write with keywords in mind.  For instance, if I want people to find this article using keywords, I would need to repeat the keywords “research” and “keyword” several times, whether I wanted to or not.  Can you imagine the writers of the past thinking in those terms?

For those of us brought up on 1) card catalogues, 2) encyclopedias and dictionaries 3) old-fashioned reference catalogues, and 4) the patience of searching of the stacks, the joy of keyword searching is unbounded.  But here’s the difference: when we pop a term into the “search box,” we are operating with a mental model of conducting the research physically.  We imagine walking to a shelf and seeking out a catalogue, chronology, or bibliographic index.  We think about whether what we want is actually a biography, history, or set of essays.  We imagine hauling a book down, scanning the index, finding the term, and riffling the pages to locate the data.  Useful data, useless data, never mind: we followed the process.

More importantly, we remember sitting at a table (or if you’re me, on the floor between the stacks) surrounded by a stack of sources we’d already checked.  Then there was that frustrating pause, where we didn’t know what to do next?  Suddenly, by connecting mental dots, reopening a volume, or entertaining a new flash of inspiration, we leapt to a solution like Nancy Drew finding the clue to the broken locket.

Sometimes that solution meant a dash back to the card catalogue, or a respectful approach to the reference librarian’s desk.  Sometimes it meant reentering the stacks or journal racks to grab something we’d nixed the first time around.  Regardless, with patience, a new door appeared, and we saw a new hallway to explore.

Do you recall all this?  If so, you’re a relic in today’s cyber-world.  A resourceful relic!

Research for us was physical.  Think how many action verbs it involved: walking, hauling, checking, dashing, reopening, reentering.  It had a physical rhythm to it, and a tangible reward.  So, when we relics sit at a computer, we’re going through the same process, only we let our fingers do the walking, and the computer do the hauling.

That’s what makes it joyful—the ease of doing what used to be physical and time-consuming!  Plus, we know when to abandon keyword searching, and return to more traditional research methods.

That’s why I worry.  What happens when students don’t have any memory of this process?  When they don’t imagine the steps of conducting research, starting with getting to the library (especially on a cold night), warming oneself at the hall radiator (what’s a radiator?), hanging up the coats while gearing up the mind, and diving in!  The patience, creativity, determination, and exhilaration of old-fashioned research is already a quaint idea for our cyber-children.

Isn’t that one of the reasons so many parents homeschool?  Because they trust traditional avenues of education?  And want to keep some focus on basic materials for the core of inquiry?  All of this allows them to add in the Internet with care and discrimination.

In a series of posts, I’d like to talk about traditional resources and research skills.  I’d like to introduce you to some of my best friends that surround me quietly on my shelves.  These friends still have plenty to offer our young people of the cyber generation.