In traditional pedagogy, students rarely experienced the processes of scientific discovery and professional debate. Published textbooks presented only the well-established theories, and laboratory exercises typically repeated experiments whose outcomes have been thoroughly documented for many years. This leads to the illusion that science is a coldly formal scientific process, when practicing scientists know that there is much speculation and many false-starts in research.

In the past this speculation existed primarily in the private communications among researchers and the research seminars conducted at major university centers or national professional conferences. The emergence of Internet web pages and discipline listservs offer undergraduate students earlier access to work in progress and partially-developed theories. The cold-fusion phenomenon is the most dramatic example of this phenomenon where this phenomenon was announced, broadly discussed, and eventually disproved through electronic forums openly available to students worldwide. More recently, a controversial assertion that anthropologists may have assisted in a deadly measles epidemic among South American Indians lead to a full online debate and refutation.

Easy access to the raw material of research is a mixed blessing. Sociologically, it introduces students to the human process of scientific discovery and exposes students to a more realistic image of how research is practiced by active scholars.

On the other hand, do undergraduate students possess the underlying disciplinary knowledge base to analyze primary sources intelligently? Is the process of exposing students to these debates the academic equivalent of novices diving into the deep end of the swiming pool? Can one comprehend academic debases without the context of the basic theories and concepts?

The web has eliminated many of the gatekeepers who controlled your access to primary sources.

Here is a faculty vignette on how primary sources improve a course.