Stephen Bourque at One Reality wrote recently about his love-hate relationship with the Internet. In the "hate" post, he brings up an interesting point about students using the Internet for research, saying that teachers should discourage use of the Internet for research until college. As a future homeschooler, I gave some thought to what he said. (I'll count on you to read Stephen's post now to get the full context for the rest of mine.)
I agree that a "report" pulled from one source without any digestion of ideas is pointless. But use of the Internet is not the cause of this problem. Students do the same thing with books all the time. The student can learn what resource to use for what purpose by the guidance and feedback he gets from his teacher. Maybe we're all becoming inured to incompetent teachers who can't tell the difference, but I've graded many essays and I think the difference between a regurgitation-essay and an essay that involved critical thinking is usually quite clear, barring clever plagiarism. If a reasonable teacher can't tell the difference, then the whole assignment may have been misguided. If you want the student to learn to do the research and use his mind, you must find a way to judge that effort. That might mean skipping the report and doing something completely different, but I suspect that is usually not necessary.
You can usually (but not always) get in-depth information and can "follow your nose" on the web - you just have to want to do the work. The student who took the lazy way using the Internet in Stephen's example would probably not do the work he describes with the books anyway. I see no difference here between books and the web - it's a matter of motivation.
In regard to the "flat" information of the Internet, I partially agree with Stephen. When I Googled "first scene of wagner's ring" the first hit was a Wikipedia entry that described the four-part opera and included the facts Stephen presented. Links were included that would probably lead to the same kind of information you would find in books. However, there is no table of contents or easy way to know what is relevant - the student would have to click around until he figures out the hierarchy of the information on his own. This method of organizing, in my own mind, the "flat" information presented to me on the web is a difficult process and sometimes I actually fail. I had this exact problem when trying to research the Paleo diet and "diseases of civilization." Finally, I had to turn to a book, which gave me a clearer, but still imperfect understanding of these ideas. Shouldn't a student, with a lot of guidance, be given the opportunity to learn to use his judgment in the same way?
The second hit brought me to a page that looked like a blog entry with a title "Wagner's Ring: A Guide For The Willing But Perplexed - Part III" and a subtitle of "First Day: Das Rheingold - Prelude and Scene 1." I started reading and had no idea what was going on. My first thought was, "I need to go back to Parts 1 and 2 if I want to understand the context of this." And I could easily have done this by using links. Then I would have had to decide if the information was relevant and reliable. Shouldn't a properly educated 12-year-old be able to do the same thing?
Regarding reliability, students using the Internet must understand that not all information they find will necessarily be true, so they need to judge the source. However, this is no different with books. Students too young to use this judgment need guidance from an adult. With books, that guidance might be, "Use the encyclopedia," and an explanation. With the Internet, it might be, "Check for multiple sources." Or, you might start compiling a list of resources with the child, categorizing them into groups such as "reliable," "semi-reliable," "unknown," and "not reliable." You can explain how you make that determination for each one, which would give the child a good inductive way of learning how to make the judgments on his own. Then you can help the child develop a process to verify unreliable information. (I put Wikipedia into "semi-reliable," and would check other sources if I had no prior knowledge of the subject.) This is not an easy process and it requires a huge mental database of knowledge about sources and what makes them credible. The only way to build that database is to start working with sources - to gain firsthand experience of the process.
This whole process is what critical thinking in research is all about. I think, at the right age and with the right guidance, the Internet is a 100% positive thing. It opens up whole new worlds of information to the child, and removes much of the drudgery of looking up mundane facts. The possible misuse of the Internet does not taint it as a tool. Stephen's final paragraph expresses this same thought, so maybe we don't disagree on anything but the age-appropriateness of the Internet. He says wait until college. I suspect a child can start using the Internet with guidance somewhere around 8-10 years old.
Since I have no real experience with this subject, I'd love get some comments, especially from teachers.
I think that it's a mixed bag. My biggest problem with using the Internet as a source is that it's too easy and so it can become the first and only source for a student. I can remember writing essays in high school where I had a stack of books that I had to digest in order to make the necessary integrations for the paper. If the Internet had existed back then, I may have been satisfied with the seeming unlimited number of sources it provided. Locating books, journals, and other sources; poring over them to find relevant details; and then dutifully integrating and citing them in your paper is a serious effort compared to Googling, CTRL+F, and then cutting and pasting.
ReplyDeleteIn college, as a history major, the Internet existed and I could make use of it as a supplement to the legwork. Having to contend with book-based research my entire adolescence, I gloried in being able to augment it with easy-peasy Internet research. But I couldn't replace it because there is so much information that isn't available on the Internet. That will, I think, change someday in the future but it's true in the present.
Books can be just as unreliable as the Internet, but by and large they aren't. The gatekeeper function that publishers, editors, and experts serve weeds out plenty of dreck that would otherwise pollute the cognitive landscape. I think discrimination about sources is going to be evermore challenging; we're in the beginning stages of this latest revolution in publishing.
Well, you're absolutely right that I cannot blame the Internet for poor education. (That's the first thing LB said to me after she read my post, so I knew I was in for some good criticism!)
ReplyDeleteI basically agree with everything you wrote - in fact, I hadn't even thought of the issue of truth, which is another good point. But I think the essence of what I was trying to say is encapsulated in your sentence, "Shouldn't a properly educated 12-year-old be able to do the same thing [i.e. organize, determine relevance, etc.]?" The key is how to get that twelve-year-old properly educated in the first place; that is precisely the focus of my post. I think using the Internet as a tool for young people to fetch information is generally damaging to their education because that information is plucked without regard to classification. I'm not saying every isolated instance of a child using the Internet to look something up is necessarily harmful - but I do regard it as a missed opportunity.
Now, books are not automatically the perfect teaching tool either. Good pedagogy requires material to be presented in a logical order (i.e. from the "ground up," so to speak). But books do reinforce a sort of patience, seriousness, and depth that the Internet does not. Plus, as I wrote (and I'm not kidding), I place value on the weight, smell, and feel of a book - a REAL book, not a "virtual" one. (This is consistent with Montessori principles, which I favor.) I've seen "educational" computer games for children that instructed them to use the mouse to stack virtual blocks, one on top of the other. I think the time a child spends doing that instead of playing with REAL blocks is crippling to him. The same goes for virtual books instead of real ones, in my opinion.
On the other hand, as a tool for obtaining supplementary material for a child's education, the Internet can be invaluable. For instance, Scott Powell (historyatourhouse.com), who has been teaching my daughter for a few years and is about the best teacher I've ever known, incorporates great works of art into his history program - paintings which are available conveniently online. But this emphasizes my point. The Internet is not used to search for anything; on the contrary, everything in Powell's presentation is carefully crafted.
Again, all of this is focused on young people. As an adult who has already learned how to think, I regard the Internet as a priceless tool.
Thanks, Stephen, for the in-depth response. You are obviously like my husband, who loves both the content and the form of books. He loves their weight, their feel, and their smell, too. I just love the content, although I must say that the moldy-woody smell of a used book store is heavenly. I think this is an optional value. Of course, it is not optional to use books - I just mean the the love of the actual real form of a book. And I don't think actual real books will ever go away, even though I'd be happy to read almost everything on a screen. (I think. I haven't actually tried it.)
ReplyDeleteThat block video game is just insane, but I think it is fundamentally different than virtual books. The whole purpose of the blocks lies in the physical motions and sensory input involved. The purpose of a book is to communicate ideas.
I think we do have a disagreement here. I don't agree that information is plucked without classification when using the Internet...as long as it is being used properly. As Bill says, it certainly is a problem if it is the first and only source for a student. But I say again, won't that be apparent in the quality of the output? I think so. I think low standards are to blame more than anything. For any serious research paper, books will be necessary. But the ability to do quick fact-checking, looking up sidelines to supplement the major research, and more is enhanced by the Internet. Students who use it properly should be able to learn more, make more connections, and produce better work than those who use only books.
Here is an example I can think of to support your position. You can use the Internet to look up pictures of all kinds of bugs so that you can learn their names and some basic facts about them. Or, you can go out in the real world and actually look at the bugs, which I think most of us would say is a good idea. Then, if you want to know their names and the facts, you can find that on the Internet or using books, matching up the pictures with what you saw outside. If you use the Internet, you can easily get a little synopsis, but you probably won't run across anything that leads you into finding out that these bugs are classified into species, genus, family, order, etc. (I had to look that up...on the Internet.) But if you got a book about bugs, you might run across that idea - that living organisms are grouped hierarchically. You might also read that certain bugs are found only in certain parts of the world and wonder why, or you might learn which animals eat bugs, etc. A book would include a context for studying bugs. (I'm not sure what that would be.)
But after trying to make your argument, I come back to mine and say that it is the teacher's job to make sure the student has the proper context for new information, which includes much more than just what you would find in a book. I thought of bugs because Samantha has been observing caterpillars recently, and for her context, she just needs to know what they look like and what they are called. Maybe I'll tell her that a caterpillar is an insect this summer after she also sees flies, bees, ants, etc. Maybe. Right now I call them all bugs. But to give her any more, such as telling her that caterpillars live all over the world, but scorpions only live in the desert, would violate the hierarchy. She doesn't know about the world yet, or what a desert is. They teach these random facts at Sam's day care and it drives me nuts. (Only 3 more months until Montessori - yea!)
Oh, I'm not sure if scorpions are insects, or if they are arachnids, or if those two are mutually exclusive. I just used the Internet to check that too but it wasn't obvious and I'm too lazy to look more closely. Maybe I'm just a product of the information-age myself and I can't judge the whole issue. :)
[...] Subscribe to feed ‹ Should Students Use the Internet for Research? [...]
ReplyDelete[...] Mossoff presents Should Students Use the Internet for Research? posted at The Little Things, saying, “Some thoughts on why children should be encouraged to [...]
ReplyDeleteHi Amy, Interesting post. I'm a teacher, though mostly I teach physics where these issues don't come up as much. I say "mostly" because I also teach history and philosophy of science type courses sometimes, and in those the students are required to write papers which involve research. I generally assign topics for such papers such that, to write a good paper, the student will have to have read the assigned materials (almost always books or photocopied papers) and been engaged in class. So, at that point, even if all they do for additional background research is surf the web, it's usually OK because they've already got a good sense of the terrain. And when somebody hasn't done the assigned reading and/or been engaged in class, and relies on just some flaky web sites, it's almost always really obvious and the paper is no good. This, by the way, is college kids, so I guess it's irrelevant to the question of whether the 'net is "OK" for younger kids.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I strongly agree with your overall point that the problem (in the problematic kinds of cases) is not the internet per se, it's the lack of motivation and judgment and seriousness of the person relying exclusively on dubious internet sources. If you took the internet away, those sorts of people would either do the same kind of superficial, shoddy research using books, or just wouldn't do anything at all (books, you know, being too difficult). So I would say the only thing the internet changes is that it makes it possible for somebody to bang something shoddy out slightly easier than they could 20 years ago. But that's really not an important difference since the shoddiness is easy to detect.
I also wanted to say something about the idea of helping kids develop good judgment about which sources to trust, etc. Something I've found over the years (motivated in part by AR's theory of concepts, and in particular the idea of "foils") is that it's really helpful to bring the "as opposed to what" perspective into explicit focus. In teaching physics, this means (for example) teaching students not only what is true, but about plausible-but-false theories from history. And, another example, sometimes showing them (in explicit step-by-step detail) a *wrong* way to approach or solve a given problem. It gives them the perspective they need to appreciate (better) what's true/right. Anyway, the point was just that you (as a homeschooling parent someday, say) could apply this to this issue. For example, as part of the assignment to write a paper or report on a given topic, require (in addition to the usual sort of bibliography) an "un-bibliography" which lists several sources that cover this topic but in a dubious or wrong or biased or sloppy or untrustworthy way. That way you actually make the issue of "good" vs. "bad" sources, and the methods of judging between them, into an explicit part of the work, if that makes sense.
The idea of an "un-bibliography" is fantastic pedagogically.
ReplyDelete"If you took the internet away, those sorts of people would either do the same kind of superficial, shoddy research using books, or just wouldn’t do anything at all (books, you know, being too difficult)."
I completely agree with this for adults. Children, left to their own devices, will do shoddy, superficial research no matter what because they're just starting out. The whole point of education in this matter is to get them to the point where they can do quality research using any source. Requiring them to not use the Internet forces them to do crummy research in books, and over time they'll get used to doing research period. Once they're good at researching in the structured, guided confines of a book, you can start helping them to tame the Internet research wilderness.
In a school setting, it may be harder to enforce the "no Internet" rule because you're constantly battling motivation issues that you have little effect over. Be too strict, and you risk losing the dicier kids wholly. In a homeschool, you have much more control because a) you have more authority than any teacher and b) you're operating at a 1:1 teacher/student ratio.
Yes, I am intrigued by the "un-bibliography" idea and with the foil idea in general. Thanks, Travis, for sharing this. I'm going to put this idea in my future homeschooling notes and assess it when I have more experience.
ReplyDelete