One of the things I do every year is serve as a judge at History Day, an annual celebration of history and the study of such in the lives of middle school/junior high school and high school students. This year, for the first time, all of the students said that the Internet gave them the most help finding information.
We judges asked them, of course, which websites gave them the most help, refining the information that way; but I was struck by the relative absence of books and magazines among the sources listed in the bibliographies for these projects and I wondered whether the students, in their perpetual corner-cutting methods of completing projects, used such “traditional” media at all.
A teacher I know requires more books and magazines as sources than websites and for good reason: “The kids would never get off the computers otherwise,” she says, and it’s good for them to still know how to operate microfilm machines and navigate a library’s stacks.
I suppose that this quandary can affect us adults as well, now that websites trumpeting the world’s news are updated minute-by-minute using sources from all over the world. I admit that I am a trifle guilty of this sort of “news mining” myself, although I prefer the newspaper and the newsmagazine for their context and depth of reporting.
There’s also the issue of credibility with websites: It’s all too easy to publish just about anything online these days, and verification of material can be suspect. You can usually judge a site’s information by its title or the reputation of its content provider. The same doctrine that historians use to prove something–get three sources that corroborate the point you’re trying to make–can be applied to websites as well. Yes, a website can have more timely information; but it can also contain erroneous information that, because it might not have been read by anyone other than the author, has no way of being verified. This is not to say that all or even a large number of websites contain false information; the converse is true. We need to keep in mind that just because someone says something or publishes something, it’s not necessarily true. Errors crop up as well in newspaper stories, newsmagazine stories, and books, but the built-in editing process catches most of the errors that you as the reader never see.
In the digital age that we are all just beginning to grow into, it’s more important than ever to hold onto the past, at least in terms of sources that you can hold in your hand. Yes, that magazine or book might be old-fashioned, but it can still provide you with the kind of picture that the blink-and-you-miss-it mentality of today’s 24/7 news cannot.
David White is an education professional who
publishes a handful of large-traffic scholarly
websites. The article above appeared in a recent
ezine of his website Social Studies for Kids
(http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com). The site
is for kids; the ezine is for adults (parents and
teachers).
