When a high school student using the Internet to do research on the Holocaust concludes that concentration camps were wellness centers for the Jews, something has gone seriously wrong. "The school taught him to access the Internet, but it didn't teach him to think about the information he was accessing," said technology expert Alan November.
As we move into the Internet era, many schools are failing to develop their students' information literacy, November charged. "We are not preparing children to be critical think- ers," he said. "And the people who want to persuade them will win, because we did not give them the survival skills of being critical discriminators of different versions of the truth."
Schools must teach students to validate information they find on the Internet, November said. "Do you know how to teach children to cross-reference over the Internet?" he challenged his audience.
Then he offered practical advice. "The Internet offers a very powerful cross-referencing strategy called the link command," November said. Copy the address of the Web site you're on, he instructed. Then go to AltaVista. Type link: in the search box, paste the Web address after the colon, and click on Search. "AltaVista then gives you a list of Web sites linked in to the one you're looking at," he said. Reviewing these linked sites will yield a "deeper, broader set of perspectives."
In the case of the student researching the Holocaust, the information came from a source that appeared to be credible—a professor at Northwestern University, Arthur Butz. "But when you do the link command," November said, "you see lots of other Web sites, like the Baltimore County Police Hate Directory, that explain that Arthur Butz is a revisionist historian."
The link command is only one way to validate information on the Internet. "You always want to do a search on the name of the author," November said. A search on Arthur Butz will produce a letter from the president of Northwestern University explaining his position regarding Butz's views, he noted.
"The Web is a web; things are connected," November emphasized. "We have to teach children to understand patterns of information, or they will be manipulated."