Educators Worry Students Don't Know Fact From
Fiction on Internet, Sparking Truth Debate
12-08-2004 10:58 AM
By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK --  Go to Google, search and scroll
results, click and copy. When students do
research online these days, many educators
worry, those are often about the only steps they
take. If they can avoid a trip to the library at
all, many students gladly will.

Young people may know that just because
information is plentiful online doesn't mean
it's reliable, yet their perceptions of what's
trustworthy frequently differ from their elders'
_ sparking a larger debate about what
constitutes truth in the Internet age.

Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried
to force students to leave their computers by
requiring at least one book for a September
class project.

She wasn't prepared for the response: "Someone
raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where
would I get a book?'"

While the answer might just have been a smart
aleck's bid for laughs, Bruckman and other
educators grapple daily with the challenge of
ensuring their students have good skills for
discerning the truth. Professors and librarians
say many come to college without any such
skills, and quite a few leave without having
acquired them.

Alex Halavais, professor of informatics at the
University at Buffalo, said students are so
accustomed to instant information that "the idea
of spending an hour or two to find that good
source is foreign to them."

In a study on research habits, Wellesley College
researchers Panagiotis Metaxas and Leah Graham
found that fewer than 2 percent of students in
one Wellesley computer science class bothered to
use non-Internet sources to answer all six test
questions.

And many students failed to check out multiple
sources. For instance, 63 percent of students
asked to list Microsoft Corp.'s top innovations
only visited the company's Web site in search of
the answer.

It's a paradox to some that so many young
Americans can be so accepting of online
information whose origin is unclear.

"Skepticism ... is part of their lives, yet they
tend to believe things fairly readily because it
appears on the Internet," said Roger Casey, who
studies youths and pop culture at Rollins
College in Winter Park, Fla.

One concern is commercial influence online; some
search engines run ads and accept payments to
include sites in their indexes, with varying
degree of disclosure.

"If I'm going to go to the library, chances are
somebody hasn't paid a librarian 100 bucks to
point me to a particular book," said Beau
Brendler, director of the Consumer Reports
WebWatch.

Another potential minefield is the growing
phenomenon of collaborative information
assembly. The credentials of the people writing
grass-roots Web journals and a committee-written
encyclopedia called Wikipedia are often unclear.
Nevertheless, some Internet users believe that
such resources can collectively portray events
more accurately than any single gatekeeper.

In many ways, the greater diversity of
information is healthy.

Paul Duguid, co-author of "The Social Life of
Information," points out that no longer, in most
of the United States, can school textbooks get
away with one-sided views.

Even South Texas College of Law professor Tracy
McGaugh finds her curriculum challenged as
students can quickly discover how other
professors teach the same material.

But as students come to trust resources that may
be correct only part of the time, the extent of
the downside is not yet fully known.

Some believe the challenge of determining whom
and what to believe amid the information flood
is bound to influence the political views,
medical decisions, financial investments and
other key aspects of this budding generation's
life.

Accuracy can be crucial when lives and property
are at stake _ and older generations certainly
don't have any particular claim to it.

In 2000, a prescribed burn calculated using
incorrect information online spread to a
wildfire that left more than 400 families
homeless in Los Alamos, N.M.

Adults who should know better get duped, too.
Georgia Tech professor Colin Potts said he
recently received by e-mail a photograph said to
be a 1954 projection of what a home computer
would look like in 2004. Instead of the small
boxes we know of today, the image shows a giant
contraption that resembles an airplane cockpit
with a large steering wheel.

"I thought this was hilarious and filed it away
in a scrapbook for my lecture next semester on
the perils of technology forecasting," Potts
said. "I also forwarded it to several people.
Unfortunately, as another colleague informed me
by e-mail a few minutes later, it's a hoax."
Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald
Associates, said many older Internet users,
familiar with the editorial review that books
and newspapers go through, may assume
incorrectly that Web sites also undergo such
reviews.

Youths, many of whom have created Web sites
themselves, tend to know better.

In the end, it's just a matter of adjusting to
how information gets around now that the
Internet has revolutionized communication.

Every new medium has its challenges, said Paul
Saffo, a director at the Institute for the
Future in Palo Alto, Calif., yet society adapts.
Referring to the 1903 Western "The Great Train
Robbery," Saffo said audience members "actually
ducked when the train came out on the screen.
Today you won't even raise an eyebrow."