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March 15, 2001

Teaching Kids To Be Web Literate

Just because it's on the Net doesn't make it true. In his upcoming book, education guru Alan November explores the importance of showing kids how to evaluate what they find on the Web.

By Alan November

The impact of the Internet on our students is already powerful and growing every day. For many kids, including my own, it's the medium of choice, replacing television or print in hard copy form. We are faced with a host of consequences of this persuasiveness. Chief among them is the illusion that anything found on the World Wide Web must be true. The Internet is a free and open global forum where anyone can express any version of the truth. It can potentially be the most dangerous information environment. At the same time the Internet opens new worlds of access to art and music and research, it can be distracting and very seductive.

The real experience of a student named Zack is a prime example of the way in which young minds can be manipulated if they are not schooled in the necessary skills of validation and evaluation of information they find on the Internet.

The Story of Zack: The Danger of Ignorance

A fourteen-year-old named Zack was asked by his retired neighbor what he was learning in school. Zack answered, "I'm working on a history paper about how the Holocaust never happened." The neighbor was incredulous. "Zack, where did you hear that the Holocaust didn't happen?" "I found it on the Internet in my high school library. Concentration camps were really clinics to help the Jews fight typhus carried by lice...."

Later that day, the neighbor called the school superintendent and demanded that Internet access be removed from the school.

How could a high school sophomore be fooled into thinking that death camps were really medical clinics? Zack was fooled because the Web site upon which he relied for his information was that of a professor at Northwestern University, Arthur Butz. Butz does not deny the existence of the camps. Instead, he explains the existence of the camps as an attempt by the German government to fight typhus carried by lice. He does not deny the shaving and the showers, the canisters of the gas Zyklon, and the crematoria and the death. He calmly and simply explains these details as necessary for the eradication of the pervasive lice. It is a persuasive document and it has the domain name of nwu.edu, Northwestern University.

Look at Professor Butz's posting from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old untrained to think critically about information. He is researching the Holocaust and by searching for the name of one of the chemicals used in the gas chambers, Zyklon, he finds a Northwestern professor's Web page. His teacher had told him to find a unique topic, and this certainly fits the bill. He has never heard these ideas before. The page is simple and clear. It's written in a calm, logical tone. From Zack's perspective, it's a valid source from a tenured professor at a top university. It has a publication date in the 1990s. It's on the Internet. It must be "true."

Although Zack learned the technical skills necessary to access the Internet using a search engine at school, he was not taught the critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate the information he accessed. His lack of knowledge of how to think critically about information made him a victim. Teaching students to use the Internet is much more complex than using a search engine to "surf" the Web. Teaching students how to make meaning from the information they access rather than simply teaching them how to access should be a top priority.

One essential step in validation involves learning about a site's author. We all know that it's easy to fool people. Many people, especially kids, will believe someone if he sounds authoritative. When I've talked to adults about Butz's Web site, they never fail to point out, "Butz is a professor, sure, but he's an engineering professor, so he really does not have credibility as a historian. What really qualifies him to speak as an expert on the Holocaust?" Unfortunately too many students see "Professor" and take what he says as official.

Zack didn't know anything about Butz but could have researched the professor's background on ProFusion (www.profusion.com), a multisearch engine that takes queries and searches from several search engines at once, including AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo!.

If Zack ran a search for "Arthur Butz," he would find Butz mentioned in a negative light in a March 1998 USA Today article titled, "College anti-Semitism on the rise, according to new report." Zack would find Butz's book described as popular among anti-Semites in a review of Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust. Zack would find Butz mentioned appreciatively on the "Aryan Re-Education Page."

No research techniques can provide a definitive answer about Arthur Butz, but they do provide many points of view. With a thoughtful teacher leading the discussion and requiring students to learn to question credibility, we can better prepare students to enter a world where they will have access to essentially any version of "the truth."

Learning from Links

One of the strengths (some would say weaknesses) of the Internet is the ability of anyone to add a link from his Web site to another. Links are the digital threads, which do not appear on the site itself, that connect Web sites to one another and make the World Wide Web a true web. Because permission is not required to make most links, it is possible that a Web author does not even know who has linked to his page.

It's important to teach our students that there is no "link police force." Within seconds, essentially anyone with a little bit of technical knowledge can create a link to point or connect to someone else's Web site. There are two critical pattern questions our students should learn to ask about links: What can we learn from the pattern of links embedded in a Web site, and what can we learn from the pattern of links pointing to a Web site from the outside?

What Can We Learn from Links within a Web Site?

Finding the links embedded in a site is relatively easy. Using a mouse to drag the cursor across a link on a page will reveal the linked Web address at the left bottom corner of the browser window. All of the links on Professor Butz's site are internal links. Each link points to information on another page of his site. You can quickly determine this by noticing that each link contains /~abutz/ in the address. He is the sole source for his own work. This pattern of all internal links should raise a red flag.

Finding the links pointing into a site requires knowledge of the structure of Web addresses and a search engine that provides the link command. While it is more complex, it can provide a more revealing perspective than internal links. The following activity can help students see how links work and perhaps even cause them to think about what the links to some of their favorite sites say about it.

Internet Sleuth

Intent of Activity: To cause students to think about and see the connection/affiliation some of their favorite Web sites have to other sites and organizations.

Investigation

1. Led by the teacher, the class brainstorms eight to ten Web sites they have visited and enjoyed either at home or at school. (Sites inappropriate to class investigation because of violent or otherwise unacceptable content should not be used in this activity.)
2. The teacher writes each usable URL on a separate card.
3. The teacher divides the class into teams of three or four.
4. Each team draws a card.
5. Each team is to visit the site on the card, print out its home page, and write a brief description of the site that includes the following: the site's author(s), advertising partners, and apparent purpose.
6. Teams paste the printout of the home page in the middle of a large piece of poster board.
7. Each team executes the link command (see How To Map Links).
8. Teams draw lines from the original home page on the poster board to the links connected to it.

Presentation

Each team gives an oral presentation to the class using their visual that explains the connections to the original site they found and what these connections tell us about the site. Classmates evaluate the presentations using predetermined evaluation qualities.

Variation

Instead of making the presentation on poster board, students may create 3-D representations of the links using foam balls and wire or any other material.

In addition to the classroom presentation by each group, students may create an electronic representation of their findings and post it on the district's, school's, or classroom's Web site.

What Can We Learn from Links Pointing to a Web Site?

What if Zack could map the links to Professor Butz's Web site? What kind of patterns of information could he gather that would help him to process the value of the revisionist claims?

A wide range of organizations, including mine, have created a link that points to Professor Butz's site. Cross-referencing the links will not give Zack a definitive answer about the value of the information. However, what Zack will discover are two broad categories of related sites: hatemongers and hate watchers. For example, Butz is on the same page as links to the Online Fascist Resource Page, Knights of Michigan KKK, White Power Central, and Texas Aryan Nationalist Skinheads-sites that reveal Butz's views are not widely held. Zack would also find that the Baltimore County Library lists Butz as a revisionist on its extensive Hate Directory.

Questioning the credibility of sources that have every appearance of being believable will become an increasingly important skill. While anyone can publish information on the Web, the ability to create instantly a list of linked sites provides an information map that can give additional perspectives to the original source. Once Zack understands the structure of the Web and how to map links, he can use this knowledge to question the views of any person posting "information."

Teach Them to Assess What They Access

Policymakers and school leaders are perplexed by the challenge of balancing blocking and access. We should all be concerned about student access. Are we protecting students too much by blocking? Are we exposing them too much by giving them the personal responsibility of appropriate behavior while they are on the network? Both positions can be based on a naive understanding of what students need to know.

I think it's safe to assume that our current elementary students will have access to the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week from a small, very fast, inexpensive toy they carry in their pocket. I cannot assume that we will be able to block the Internet as kids access it from the playground. Blocking students in school can be a very short-term victory, a classic case of winning the battle and losing the war.

Alan November, a senior partner at Educational Renaissance Planners (www.anovember.com), is an internationally known educational technology leader. He can be reached at alan@anovember.com.

Adapted from Empowering Students With Technology by Alan November. ý 2001
SkyLight Training and Publishing Inc. Reprinted by permission of SkyLight Professional Development (800)348-4474.

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