When I was a kid an unimaginative teacher made my class find three political stories to summarize for a discussion of an election. Dutifully I cut them out, pasted them to my loose-leaf paper and wrote a few sentences about what I had read. The assignment didn't further my interest in the political process or in voluntary reading of the newspaper. My experience was not isolated; lots of kids were involuntary readers of the newspaper.

There were exceptions. I recall boys picking up a paper to follow their favorite team's scores or girls reading about a television or movie star. But world news - even national news -seemed pretty remote. Newspapers rarely became important until you reached your 20s and had just enough history behind you to appreciate the importance of events taking place in the world.

Computer technology is changing classroom assignments. Now with a computer and modem a kid can go online, search for information on any subject, call up articles from newspapers, magazines, journals, encyclopedias, talk to people around the world who are experts on a subject, or converse with someone in Bosnia, or any other place where news is happening.

Kids can have news delivered directly to their computers on any subject of interest, creating their own personalized version of the news. Moreover, kids can become their own reporters, researching any topic of interest from the wire service reports that appear as they are written and from first-hand communication with participants in these events.

Take, for example, a story I heard recently from the president of a software company. His son was assigned to do a report on a disease and selected leprosy. As he was cruising the Internet for information, he came across a newsgroup on leprosy. When he joined the discussion he found himself conversing with someone with the illness who could give him a firsthand account of what it was like to have it and why he thought politics was getting in the way of his receiving the proper treatment. This type of research has more impact on a young mind than cutting out three articles.

By 2000, 14.2 million kids are expected to have access to online services and the World Wide Web, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., up from about 6.6 million today. And research shows that today's online kids are embracing cyberculture.

Last fall, TBWA Chiat/Day and Business Wire reported the results of a poll they sent to 1,500 online households with children ages 6 to 15. Some key findings showed that:

• 70 percent have researched a topic for school online.
• 89 percent would rather conduct research for a school project online than with books in a traditional library.
• 84 percent would rather do homework on a computer than with pen and paper.
• 57 percent believe that when they grow up, they will get the vast majority of their daily news from the Internet.
• 27 percent think they will get their news from TV, and less than 8 percent plan on needing to read a newspaper.

Information delivery will become more portable so that lightweight, compact news screens could be conveniently carried with all the international, national, local and business news you desire. By the time the kids in the above survey are adults, these devices could be commonplace. In 10 years, waiting for the newspaper to be delivered to your door could be as outdated as waiting for milk and bread to be delivered now. The Internet has made instant gratification easy for newshounds and information seekers.

So, do I think computer-savvy kids of today will be different when it comes to their reading habits in the future? You bet I do. They will want any knowledge they desire to be instantly available. They'll want intelligent agents to scan databases of information to pick out what they need. They'll want the choice to get abstracts or go deeper into the knowledge vaults for full details. It's the natural extension of the hyperlinks that exist now on the World Wide Web. Click here and jump there for more information. Knowledge will have to be flexible, expandable and quickly retrievable.

News will be a valuable commodity. Newspapers less so. They will be expensive, slightly-out-of-date, but still fun for browsing. The older generation, with memories of cutting out those articles for their third-grade teachers, may prefer reading the newspaper with their morning cup of coffee.

As for what kids will be reading on the Internet? Well, boys will probably still be checking for baseball scores and girls for information about their favorite celebrities. Some things are slow to change.

Pearlman is editor-in-chief of HomePC magazine.