I hear the Internets are a series of tubes...

Although I am not in a teacher-librarian position yet, I do notice the trend of students immediately going towards a computer whenever a class comes to the library for research on a project. There will be trolleys of books ready for them that I’ve searched the library for and many of the books will be perfectly suitable for their project, but these goes unnoticed and often unused even though I have talked to the class about the usefulness of the books I pulled.

The district I work in and the high school I TOC in the most have purchased many online references for the students to use. We constantly remind the students to take a look at these because of the level of accuracy and authority. Unfortunately, many students will just opt to “google” something and use the first few websites that come up.

I do have an affinity towards books and journals (either the hard copy or online version) over the Internet for research even though I do consider myself technologically literate. The most practical reason for this is that in books (generally speaking of course) there is a certain level of fact checking and editing that comes into play. We are typically quite certain that what we are reading has some level of accuracy and if we want to dispute it, there’s a bibliography at the end of the piece and we can look that up too until we are satisfied with what we’ve found. The Internet doesn’t always have this. Many sites are based on personal opinions and many aren’t properly fact checked.

I don’t think that we can change students’ attitudes towards the Internet. In fact, I think it would almost be wrong to change that because we can’t hold back technology and progression. We wouldn’t want a generation of luddites, because we were fearful of inaccuracies in the Internet. Because of all of this, we have to teach the students to evaluate and critically think about the kinds of information they are getting from the Internet.



Perhaps this is what might happen if we don't teach the students about the Internet and technology:

"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Why? Because it got tangled up in a big ball with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material." - US Senator Ted Stevens, June 28 2006