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The Teaching Librarian 19.2 33 by Susan Foster Beyond and Evil that will eventually modify our cognitive behaviour. he observes, "our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged..... we can expect ... that the circuits woven by our use of the net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works." Scary stuff. and yet, the readi- ness with which our teaching colleagues encourage the use of general search en- gines is testament to this trend. we are encouraging our students to be- come, in carr's words, "pancake people" for whom immediacy supersedes depth. Time-pressed society does not encour- age or reward students to think deeply; a sign of this is the phenomenon of rubric evaluation where one "ticks" off achieve- ment rather than assesses the merit of work. critical and higher level thinking skills and bloom's Taxonomy continue to be the pedagogical backbone of teacher education and yet the influences of both are increasingly challenged. expediency over effort seems to be the unspoken mantra, accompanied by the hand wring- ing over the increase of plagiarism and lack of academic integrity. what to do? The answer is twofold. First, the assumption that the classroom teach- er is adept at navigating the Internet and locating credible information must be confronted as unreliable. It is therefore the job of teacher-librarians to teach not only students, but also their teachers in order to increase overall web-literacy as well as to facilitate research. Second, teacher-librarians must continue to en- gage in active collaboration with the classroom teachers to produce assign- ments that are authentic, meaningful and feasible. "The plethora of data available to students has become, ironically, an obstacle to the acquisition of knowledge. continued on page 34