Two years ago, I began to notice that my students had stopped writing and had begun pointing. And clicking.

They were downloading information from the World-Wide Web and pasting it together, effortlessly,

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: What kind of impact is Web-based research having on the quality of student papers and learning? How can faculty members encourage students to make the best use of the Web? (The responses)

in a document on the computer screen. That was what the modern term paper had become.

I wrote an essay about the change for The Chronicle ("How the Web Destroys the Quality of Students' Research Papers," Point of View, August 15, 1997), and to my surprise, I soon found my words reprinted all over the world and myself cast as a voice of dissent, enemy of technology. That was when I learned that the right few words written at the right time in the right place can have more influence than those big books that I had labored over for many years, for the edification of the few and the dedicated.

Ours is an age of instant data and sudden polarity, and any opinion is more likely to be listened to if it is easy to categorize. We are all supposed to be for or against things, and if we waver, protest, or point out the complexities, we are dismissed as academic wafflers who have forgotten the value of clarity.

I resented being called anti-technology. When we examine something seriously, we almost always find that it has both good and bad points. So it was with my examination of the Web. Improving dramatically each season, the Web offers instant access to information that previously we would have needed days or weeks to amass. That is truly remarkable. For years, we'd heard that facts would soon be at our fingertips -- and now they are.

We can get information faster, but are we any better trained to sift through it and use it to produce a creative, balanced, and informed point of view? In bars and cartoons, on talk shows, and in op-ed pieces, a lot of people are saying the same thing: "If this is the age of information, how come no one seems to know anything?" We take knowledge all the more for granted if we confuse it with information. They are by no means the same thing. Information is the details, all those data that are now so easy to locate. Knowledge is being able to put the details together and draw a clear conclusion. That is what students are not being trained to do. Or, if they are being trained to do it, they are not thinking for themselves in the process, preferring to spend only a few minutes sifting through possible sources of information. They trust the data they download a lot more than their own ideas.

But I don't want to complain any more about students' honest efforts to save themselves some time. I teach engineers philosophy, literature, and the meaning of communication. I love technology, and I use it all the time, from clarinets and cars to word processors and digital audio systems.

A teacher's duty is to inspire, and you can't inspire by becoming known as an oracle of complaint. I don't want to be remembered as that cranky professor who pointed out that the Web makes students forget how to think for themselves. The Web can have that effect, but it also can do much that is positive.

I've changed my approach to the Web. I now insist that my students use it as much as possible. But I don't want them to simply download information, and I especially don't want them just to print out a bunch of Web pages and hand them in to me with a satisfied grin: "See, I've been working hard on research." Instead, I want my students to use the Web for what it was first designed to do -- to allow an individual user to connect with other people, and with their fluid, developing ideas.

Printed material is still the best place for well-formed and clearly articulated ideas. But on the Web, you can find ideas in motion, and you can communicate far more easily with the people who produced the printed material than was possible before we all went on line. When I was in college, I heard (possibly apocryphal) tales of spirited students who picked up the phone and called Bertrand Russell ("Would the gentleman please try again at a more appropriate hour ...") or Mme. Claude Levi-Strauss ("Don't worry, mon ami, no one else understands my husband's work either."). Today, an enterprising student can track down the e-mail addresses of the writers and thinkers we have been studying in class, and contact them with astonishing ease.

If a student writes a well-worded, careful, and important question, then the mind at the other end might very well answer -- not just direct the student to some published reference, but respond directly to the question. Some of us are besieged by scads of unwanted e-mail messages, but most of us still consider the genuine inquiries with gravity as we sort out the chaff.

In my environmental-ethics class, we read John McPhee's Encounters With the Archdruid, about the conservationist David Brower. A giant in his field, Brower is still going strong at age 87, trying to place at least 2 per cent of the land in the United States under protection as wilderness. (He is fond of pointing out that another 2 per cent is already paved.) A recent book by the philosopher and mountain guide Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (University of Arizona Press, 1996), argues that the whole notion of managing wilderness kills the wildness that we love.

I had my students try to send Brower e-mail messages; one student, Christian Schmidt, reached him and asked what he thought of Turner's critique. Brower replied that he hadn't read Turner's book, but that it sounded "like more word games being played with 'wilderness,' something too precious to deconstruct, with our time too limited to waste on such pursuits."

That's what I'd thought Brower might say. But the lesson I really wanted to teach was that a student can reach a great activist or another prominent person easily on the Internet. Who knows? Brower might very well now take a look at Turner's ideas, consider them, and develop a response that pushes environmentalism along just a tiny bit.

In fact, communicating with people is an obvious way to use the Web, and students are already doing it all the time, from making dates to buying stocks and auctioning cars. But when it comes to college, they still use the Web only to download data to pad their own thinking with juicy-sounding facts and sound bites.

In another class I teach, on technology and human values, our final unit this semester will focus on the Y2K problem. How serious is it? Is it just the latest example of millennial fervor? How can we separate truth from fantasy in the warnings of impending danger that are proliferating across the Web? My students will have to find their own readings on the topic, and then they will have to check each item's legitimacy by finding out who is behind the material and what that person's biases are. I will insist that they not simply look up information about the Web pages' makers, but ask those people pointed questions in e-mail messages.

People are always behind information; sometimes they hide from the public, but most often they are accessible. We need to teach our students to use their computers to have a dialogue with the people behind the ideas. The biggest difference between the computer and the television set should not be how close we're allowed to sit to the screen, but how much we are able to communicate with what is behind the images we see.

David Rothenberg is an associate professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is a co-editor, with Michael Tobias and Patrick Fitzgerald, of A Parliament of Minds: Philosophy for a New Millennium, to be published by SUNY Press this fall in conjunction with a PBS series of the same name.

JOIN THE DEBATE