Educators warn students: Be wary of Web

Students from middle school to college may be able to navigate the cyberworld better than their parents can, but when it comes to using the Internet for research papers, Maine educators say they’re still babes in the woods.

Students at all levels must be taught to separate the good from the bad information they glean from the Web, librarians say.

The Internet has been accessible in most Maine schools for six to seven years, and available to many students in their homes for more than a decade.

Five years ago, Gov. Angus King’s laptop initiative put the online world at the fingertips of almost all students.

But when it comes to gathering information for homework and research papers, this accessible sea of information isn’t pristine. Librarians from middle school up to the university level are trying to teach students to use critical thinking skills as they cast their nets through Internet searches.

Kathleen Oliver, librarian at Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast for 10 years — the same period the Internet has been widely available — said the Web has provided blessings and challenges.

As librarians, "our worst nightmare is to send people away without the information they want," she said, a scenario that has become rare in the Internet age.

A student wanting information about the ruby-throated hummingbird might find a passage in a book in the school library about the creature. But finding an entire book devoted to the species is unlikely.

The wonder of the Internet is that a Google search on "ruby-throated hummingbird" yields 425,000 pages.

But too often, Oliver and other librarians and teachers have seen students gather information for assignments that is inaccurate — consider the widely publicized errors found on Wikipedia.com — or biased. And the ease with which students cut and paste from Web sites has led to a rash of plagiarism, often unintended.

As a way of helping students wade into the Web, Oliver and teachers identify sites they find useful for student assignments.

"Just as we select books for the library, we preselect sites," she said, with an eye toward accuracy. Oliver bookmarks those sites for pupils on the library’s computers, or posts links on the library’s or the teacher’s home page.

Seventh-graders at Troy Howard are assigned papers about an entrepreneur or inventor, and Oliver and the classroom teachers select sites that yield good information for that project.

To prepare them for unrestricted surfing, Oliver presents a primer on using the Web to every pupil in the school, usually team-teaching with English and social studies teachers. Pupils are taught to screen the Web using "the five w’s," Oliver said: Who created the site, for whom, when was the information posted, why, and so on.

"We look at the intention of the sponsors," Oliver said. "There is a lot of evaluation that has to go on."

For example, a report about the Ku Klux Klan might lead a student to the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, or to a site maintained by a racist group. Both might yield information for an assignment, but the context of each is critical.

Also, students learn how to limit the terms they include in the search engine, and get to see how their choices yield different results.

It’s the opposite approach the students’ parents might have used, Oliver said. Instead of using a broad, funnel-style search for information, the Web demands an inverted funnel approach.

Oliver often uses Google, she said, but she and other educators favor a search engine called Vivisimo.com.

"It clusters the results," she said.

Students also must learn how to navigate their way through a site to get the kernels of information they need.

"It’s so natural for children," to click their way through a site, but a more slow, deliberate approach is often more appropriate. "Read your screen" is the mantra, Oliver said.

Plagiarism is a plague associated with Web research.

"Copy-and-paste is so easy," Oliver said, so students sometimes lift sentences or even paragraphs from a site and paste them into their assignment document.

"We convince them not to do that and to instead take notes," she said, and to write down the name and address of the site that yielded the information.

Despite the efforts of librarians like Oliver, incoming students at the university level are not as Web-savvy as one might expect.

Nancy Lewis, who heads the research portion at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library in Orono, said students arrive in college not knowing how to use the Web responsibly.

"It’s not getting better," she said.

The university offers a library literacy course that covers the basics of Web research, and Lewis has taught it for several semesters.

"We emphasize critical thinking," asking the students to learn "who created the page, and what are their biases. These are the skills we feel we still have to emphasize," she said.

To show students how suspect information can be on the Web, Lewis takes them to Wikipedia.com and demonstrates how anyone can change an entry in the online encyclopedia.

With the resources available at the Fogler Library, instructors and librarians often nudge students toward print sources and away from the Web, she said, but many undergraduate assignments still rely on the Internet.

One bright spot at the university level, Lewis said, is in the awareness students have about plagiarism.

"I see a real improvement there," she said.