Considerations of Collaborative Learning in Web 2.0 Environments

I am thinking about the implications of the following video (if you cannot see the YouTube video linked below, search Google using the phrase: "The Machine is Us/ing Us").

What would the discussion in class be like, if instructors prepared an assignment before the beginning of a class challenging the students to see how many articles on a given subject (picked by the instructor) they could find before the class? Apparently, an instructor found students in one class who had found 94 articles on an assigned topic before the class began. How might that change class activities?

Would it help us to prepare for academic life when we face this as a classroom?