Students of a subject area can practice the skills of academic professionals in the field, researching the primary literature.
Students can be encouraged to investigate areas of interest to them and to accept responsibility for finding that material, rather than the course tutor providing all the materials in the form of a recommended reading list.
The ability to search for information will clearly be a highly prized skill in the emerging Information Society. Many of these skills, even though acquired for the pursuit of an academic goal, can be reapplied in other contexts.
With online resources, it becomes possible for undergraduates to undertake information searching activities that are more similar to those previously only undertaken at the postgraduate level.
The ability to do complex keyword searches over many years of article indices with a few keypresses means that literature-based activities can be more complex, challenging and rewarding for the students. Moreover, the skills of information searching are generic: they can be applied to any subject area and are clearly important for graduates entering an increasingly information-based economy.
Just because undergraduates can now perform activities that are usually done by postgraduates, that does not mean that we can or should treat them as such. In particular, although they can undertake the mechanics of information searching, their lack of experience in the subject domain means that inevitably they are less able to make sensible value judgements about the quality, relevance and importance of retrieved items. We need to allow for this problem, by explicitly addressing it in any devised activities.