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The Internet
is deceptively easy. You can log on pretty much automatically. You can
find information without much trouble at all. Finding truth is quite another
matter.
This
is a great opportunity to support your children, helping them to identify
reliable sources, notice bias, resist propaganda and develop their own
independent ideas based upon research. If you raise your children on a
steady diet of Internet information well leavened with lessons on how
to browse, sort, sift, cull and synthesize, you will see a tremendous
pay-off as they pass through school and into the job market.
The days
of highly digested information sources and spoon-feeding are over. We
expect that young people will learn to graze through a much wider and
richer variety of sources as they seek answers to questions. At the same
time, we must recognize that navigating and exploring these resources
will require a new set of thinking and problem-solving skills.
The better
your children are at generating questions, the more capable they will
be when building answers. The most important tool for building answers,
ironically, is questioning. The more thorough and thoughtful the questions
posed before and during the research, the greater the chance that the
investigation will lead to insight.
Begin
with a choice your family is about to make. Before you jump onto the Internet
and begin your search, challenge your child to think of as many questions
as possible while you type them or write them down. Questions beget questions.
Once you have a healthy list of questions, keep your list open so you
can enter relevant findings as you encounter them. Your child learns the
importance of planning before researching. In addition, the act of searching
becomes more structured as the skills of note-taking are introduced.
Many
of the sites on the Internet are promotional in some sense. They are often
there to sell an idea or a product. Make sure your child knows the meaning
of "propaganda" and some of its tricks such as "partial truths," appeals
to emotion and fear, exaggeration, stereotyping, and references to authority.
Point out examples as you encounter them.
Because
many sites are more interested in persuasion than education, you will
often find facts and information lacking. Since our goal is to show young
ones how to make up their own minds, they need to find sites which provide
the raw materials, not pages of someone else's insights and opinions.
Make certain your child knows the difference between fact and opinion.
Print out pages from sites and then take turns with a yellow underlining
pen identifying facts on those pages.
Information
in electronic forms is much easier to store and organize for later review
than printed material. As much as possible we want our children to know
how to take notes electronically, cutting and pasting when appropriate,
paraphrasing when desirable. Show your children how to take notes using
a word processor if they are young beginners or with a database program
if they are old enough and computer skilled. Set up either the word processor
or the database with sections or fields within which you will be entering
your findings.
Efficiency
is paramount. We want our children to learn how to locate such discrete
"correct answers" with a minimum of wheel spinning and time wasting. We
also want them to understand the difference between finding an answer
on the one hand and building an answer on the other hand. Brainstorm with
your child a list of 20-30 questions which have correct and exact answers.
Make sure your questions come from a broad cross section of topics. How
quickly can you find the answer to each of these questions? Keep track.
The choice of strategy should change with the topic and the category.
You may want to use search engines for some questions and indexes for
others. Just make sure your child joins in the strategizing. Where do
we start and why?
Children
need to learn that discovery often requires persistence. "I want the answer
and I want it NOW!" Children must learn to "go the distance." The ability
to stick with a tough thinking or learning task over time will give your
child an important advantage in school and later on in life. Ask your
child to identify a topic or a subject which they might enjoy "tracking"
for several months. Take advantage of the "personal page" function of
Internet news sites or use one of the ALERT programs available to seek
out certain topics or stories. Create a storage area on your computer
where you and your son or daughter can save all of the articles and information
you can find. It is important to do some of this collecting as a team,
but you should also make certain that your child will take personal responsibility
for monitoring the topic. When working as a team, you can coach your child
toward deeper understandings by elevating the questioning process, by
probing and looking for connections with previous findings, by challenging
your child to identify patterns, trends and relationships.
New information
technologies make it very easy to gather information, but when will your
child learn to digest and synthesize such findings? It is important to
challenge him or her to distill, summarize and cull the findings until
a clear picture emerges. Can they develop insight and make sense from
all the information? Children at the end of elementary school on up should
be able to create a product or a presentation or letter of support which
summarizes and reports their findings. Challenge your child to put their
findings into a presentation of some kind.
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