Every time I do a school visit, I ask kids to tell me what are good sources of information on the Internet and what are not so good sources of information on the Internet. For the most, part they don’t know. It could be because no one taught it to them, but it’s more likely that someone taught it to them in the beginning of the year and they forgot.
They’re on the computer so much that I think they need to be reminded continuously so that they start to have patterned behavior of how to use the computer for research. Studies show that behavior doesn’t change until you do something the same way eight times, on an average. So you can’t tell kids what websites are good and what websites are bad at the beginning of the year and then not remind them all the time.
I tell them about .edu and .gov and go to a historical society, go to a museum, go to a university. And then I ask them what shouldn’t you go to? So once we start talking about it and I start giving them examples and it’s back and forth, then they start to get it. So in the beginning of me saying what would be a good source of information, a child might say, “Well, you know, a fifth grade book report on Jane Adams.”
I’ll say, “Well, why do you think that that’s a good source of information, or why don’t you think that’s a good source of information,” and then they’ll start to see for themselves that you can’t necessarily trust that as a source of information. So it’s all about what source can you trust. And, you know, we like to believe that we can trust historical societies and museums and universities.
And, also, the big part of using the internet for a resource. I’ll say, “Well, how much research do you think I did on Almost Astronauts and where do you think I got the information,” and they’ll say, “The internet.” And I’ll say, “Well, where on the internet,” and they’ll say, “Google.” And I’ll say, “But Google is a search engine, so what do you think I needed to put in in Google to find that?”
And, so on it goes. And what we eventually get to in the conversation is that the internet is a collection of bits and pieces of information. You cannot find context on the internet. Context is the key to all of this. So if they find out one piece of information over here and one piece of information over there, how do they then tie it all together?
So we talk about what other forms of research do they have at their disposal to use. So we talk about books and they can find books in their library, or they can go on Amazon and find books about a topic that maybe their library can get for them. We talked about using periodicals, to find newspaper articles and then how you interview someone and what does that look like.
You can videotape an interview with someone, you can audiotape it and how do you start to use as much as you can. So, I talk to them basically about thinking outside the box and thinking about all their senses. So, can you read it, hear it, see it, smell it? What are the various different things that we can bring in so that you can get as much of a multi-sensory experience of what you’re researching as possible.
