According to Prof Brabazon (via Danny Sullivan) it does:

She said: “I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both, not one or the other, not a cheap solution.”

She will be giving a lecture on the issue, called Google Is White Bread For The Mind, at the Sallis Benney Theatre in Grand Parade, Brighton, on Wednesday at 6.30pm.

I’d like to hear more detail of her argument before passing judgment. I’ll observe though that there seem to be a couple of things confused here. One is about print versus online, as in the quotation above. The other is about how to research online:

Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.

She said thousands of students across the country, including those at the universities of Brighton and Sussex, were churning out banal and mediocre work by using what search engines provided them.

Here, I agree. It is easy to get mediocre or simply wrong answers from a quick Google search. It’s especially dangerous because of the internet’s echo effect. Misinformation can spread rapidly when it is something people want to believe. This then looks superficially like corroboration. For example, a poorly-researched paper on DRM in Vista was widely treated as authoritative because the story, that Microsoft broke Vista for the sake of DRM, was so compelling. See here for more on this. I am not making a point about DRM in Vista here. I am making the point that arriving at the truth takes a great deal more work than simply reading the first article you find, even if it is widely quoted.

This implies a need to educating students in how to do research, rather than banning online sources. I agree though that a trip to the library is also important. Not everything is in Google’s index, yet.