Hola la Maestra,

You have accurately described our dilemma in colleges as well. Five years ago when we asked students if they had a computer at home, only about 30 % of the hands went up. Now about 85%.
Computers are becoming widespread in our society, even in rural counties. They enjoy using the Internet, and they use the databases because the faculty forces them to have so many citations gathered from the databases. Frankly our databases, OCLC's FirstSearch, Wilson Select, ProQuest Academic Search Elite, are fantastic and most provide full-text articles.

The problem with the Internet and undergraduate students is that they are not content specialists, and tend to accept material that is questionable as authenticated cannon. We tell them that the databases are accurate and that the journals have juried peer review of the information in them. They still prefer the Internet! Now this is anecdotal and obtrusively observed. Maybe Nesbitt is right, the Net Generation is cognitively different when it comes to information gathering, we need to test this.

Saludos,
Carmen

Hola colega!
Cognitively different? I don't know. I suspect we are getting more of the "sit on my butt and push some buttons" approach to life and less cognitive anything! I've seen students look up words on the computer because they don't want to get up and walk 10 feet to the dictionary! We have so much "fast"stuff in our lives now... microwaves and drive throughs and instant everything and 20 second commercials and the speed of obsolescence. My students don't appear to be using online resources with any thought or judgement at all...it just is easier than getting up and moving, or having to think about where to look for a reference. Just ask your question and jeeves will tell you what you want to know...why think?

We've begun to set standards for research/reference projects at my school. Thankfully I have my principal's backing in requiring that teachers only assign questions that cannot be merely cut and pasted to answer. And we're getting very serious about teaching searching SKILLS, which is somewhat difficult to do with kids who grew up thinking that they knew their way around the internet by just (I'm not making this up) typing what they wanted info on in the address bar. (candles.com, for example.)they don't understand Boolean logic either, and wind up with 150K hits on a search! While there are indeed wonderful new worlds open to us now, there are also a lot more pitfalls! It is an exciting time to be a librarian...so much uncharted country to explore and to guide students through!