Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea – Help your kids narrow their Web searches

INFORMATION literacy seems to be a phrase whose time has come. Last month, the Educational Testing Service announced that it had developed a test to measure students’ ability to evaluate online material. That suggested an official recognition that the millions spent to wire schools and universities is of little use unless students know how to retrieve useful information from the oceans of sludge on the Web.

Clearly, "computer skills" are not enough. A teacher of Scandinavian literature at Berkeley recently described how students used the Web to research a paper on the Vikings: "They’re Berkeley students, so, of course, they have the sense to restrict their searches to ‘vikings NOT minnesota.’ But they’re perfectly willing to believe a Web site that describes early Viking settlements in Oklahoma."

That trusting nature is partly a legacy of the print age. If we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the things we read in library books, it is because they have been screened twice: first by a publisher, who decided they were worth printing, and then by the librarian who acquired them or the professor who requested their purchase.

The Web imposes no such filters, even as it allows users to examine subjects people would never have gone to a traditional library to research, like buying a printer or a cheap airline ticket. Many adolescents use the Internet to get information about issues they are reluctant to discuss with parents or teachers, like sexual behavior, sexual identity, drug use or depression and suicide.

By GEOFFREY NUNBERG

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/weekinreview/13numb.html?

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Help your kids narrow their Web searches

Teacher-librarian offers tips on finding credible information

Bill Roberts / The Idaho Statesman

OK, your junior high student is planning a research paper on Spain.

Where should the search for information begin?

Most students would probably get on the Internet and use a search engine like Google to find out about Spain.

You know what you get? 76,600,000 Web sites.

There has to be a better way.

There is, says Jonelle Warnock, a teacher-librarian at West Junior High School.

Warnock has compiled lists of databases and Web sites from Boise School District and the Idaho State Library to help kids and parents get top-notch, credible information and cut down on their research time as well.

Full Story: http://www.idahostatesman.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050213/NEWS010401/502130316/1002/NEWS01