I set my students to work to do a little research using online primary resources using this assignment on Canadian newspapers. It seemed like a simple way to get them to poke around primary sources and see what they could do with them.

Unfortunately for the kids, old newspapers aren’t indexed and the search engine on one of the two sites we used is, well, inefficient would be the kindest thing you could say about it. This means you need to know the date of the event you’re researching, and you need to read through a lot of articles in quite a few newspapers in order to find the fairly small amount of information you need to do the assignment. It takes quite a bit of time. It’s annoying, but research is like that sometimes.

This presented quite a challenge for my students who can’t recall a time when Google couldn’t give them instant answers. After poking around in the newspapers for about 10 minutes, they claimed they couldn’t find anything and started trying to search the wider Web in order to (unsuccessfully) find appropriate newspaper articles or (worse yet) secondary sources.

As a guy who studied history and spent endless hours reading rolls of microfilm in dimly lit library rooms, I was surprised by the kids’ reaction until it occurred to me that they’ve probably never had this problem before. They’ve never had to carefully examine document after document to find one elusive answer. Examining countless documents takes a lot of patience, and that may be one thing that the easy access to instant information has taken away from them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m endlessly fascinated by the possibilities that the Internet offers education. Yet to give easy and quick answers too often seems to have limited the patience of at least a few of my 16 year old students. While that might not matter too much in school, there are endless occasions in life when you need to patiently sift for an answer, whether that’s correcting a minor error in you programming code, or interviewing applicant after applicant to find just the right teacher or pastor. You need to be able to search intensely, moving slowly, and not getting frustrated.

Immediate access to all the knowledge on the planet offers a lot, but it takes a bit away, too.