Technology instructor says kids need to learn how to judge reliability of Internet information.
By Linda Theil / Special to The Detroit News
Horne, 28, has been teaching elementary students the rudiments of technology at Howell Public Schools for six years. He observed that students use the Web to gather information, but he worried that students who grew up relying on the Internet for data would be unable to judge the value of its information.
"People over the age of 25 have had the experience of going to a card catalog and finding research information," Horne said. "Kids today -- it comes so easy to them. Information is so instant. And they don't have that experience of knowing where the data comes from."
I grew up befriending our school librarians so I could borrow really good to read books as research materials for my projects.
When I went to college and had my now hubby as my boyfriend, I learned that Librarianship is not just some geeky stuff. Well, a man without eyeglasses, with long hair in a pony tail, who's a frat man....isn't the stereotypical librarian at all! I guess he doesn't mind being called a librarian or a researcher with being infront of the computer monitor most of the time using the internet. Being a librarian now is cool, and surfing is fun!
Reiner's undergraduate course at the University of the Philippines was called BS Library and Information Science. And mind you, they were using the internet as substitutes for what was then card catalogues. Finding research information from the internet is more convenient and with a wide resource to choose from.
I use the World Wide Web too when I give reference lists for my studets' research projects.
But the question is, is it really safe for our kids to be dependent on internet research?
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Thanks to Little Miss Teacher for the pic. It's supposed to be animated, I wonder what happened. Or is it just my computer?
RELATED TOPICS: education, students,Library and Information Science
5 comments:
I love the internet and find it difficult to remember life without it. However, I do think students, and even many adults, are too dependent on it, to the exclusion of other sources of information. It's natural that the first place we look for info would be the internet--after all, it's usually the most convenient. But for many, it is the first and the last source. Students seem to believe that it doesn't exist if it can't be found online. It's disturbing.
Syempre from a libraria's point of view, definitely not :). I remember my eldest son asking me if he could use my dial-up account to "Google". I ask him what he was going to look up, he said he wanted to read on myth. So I said no he can't and encouraged him to visit their school library. True enough he found one and borrowed it and I borrowed one for him from our library as well.
i do enjoy libraries and the smell of books, but i am not discounting the benefits of the internet. one owrd of advice lang, make sure the security is high on blocking unauthorized sites to prevent the kids from entering "adult" sites.
btw, uve been tagged!
I still think that it isn't safe as a primary source of research and reference info for kids. Maybe yes for responsible adults, college students, etc who can filter out trash in their brains, but not for kids. I agree with Owen FV on site security and filtering. With the site search filter off, try an image search of something as simple as "girl in business suit" or "real estate" and you'd be surprised what hits you'll turn up. I still also feel that information on the net hasn't been refereed enough so the chance of stumbling onto wrong and potentially damaging information that someone young and wide-eyed will readily accept as truth is relatively high. For news and current events, nothing beats the web for speed. Pay for info sites, online encylos and dicts that charge, etc. may be fine. Yahoo's listing of online reference sources seems okay, although I did stumble upon a nude pic in an entry about Pope Benedict on Wikipedia.org once. Seems it wasn't taken down fast enough. As far as I'm concerned, if it's free and it isn't monitored agressively enough, there's still some amount of danger for kids.
it can be a good resource, but users need to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. some exercises on searching the internet, going to the library, interviewing knowledgeable sources and comparing results would probably help new users to appreciate the differences.
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