the times they are a-changin'

Wow... how writing a research paper has changed.

Back in the day, research meant going to the library. You’d start with the card catalog, looking up a topic and then hunting through the shelves for books that might contain the information you needed. From there, it was a deep dive into encyclopedias, microfiche, newspapers, magazines, and whatever other publications were available. Once you found something useful, you copied the information onto index cards, made Xerox copies, or simply wrote notes on notebook paper. Then came the task of organizing and synthesizing all of that information into a coherent paper.

Along came computers, the internet, and online databases. Suddenly, research was available at your fingertips. Information could be copied, pasted, and stored in digital files for organization. Even then, I still wrote a lot of notes by hand and often used actual scissors and tape to cut apart and group ideas before drafting a paper. After all the gathering and organizing came the writing, weaving everything together into a cohesive final product.

When I was teaching, Wikipedia had become a popular source of information, but it wasn’t considered a valid academic source because it was crowd-sourced and could be edited by anyone.

And now there’s AI. Artificial Intelligence. Type in a topic, and a paper can be generated in seconds.

As times change, the way we do things changes too. I’m grateful for the skills I learned all those years ago. The process of digging for information, evaluating sources, and connecting ideas taught me far more than how to write a research paper. It developed critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills that continue to serve me in many other aspects of life.