Parents, Teachers - Role of the Internet - 2004-09-13 at 10:20
OTTAWA -- Virginia Hartley understands the lure of the Internet all too well.
Hartley's eight children range in age from three to 21, and it's getting harder to enforce a firm rule in her household: she acknowledges the value of educational Web sites, but her kids must exhaust all traditional routes before they can go online to get information for school assignments.
The Hartley home in Edmonton has a well-stocked library and an attentive mom keen to teach basic research skills and penmanship.
"The first is the book. The first is pen and paper. And if they still want more information than they already have located, then you've got the computer. It's the secondary tool. It's an important tool, but it's still a secondary tool," said Hartley.
Teachers and parents across the country are wrestling with the same question: where should technology and the Internet fit in the world of learning?
There seems to be an endless stream of online material from which to draw, but the sheer quantity of information --some of questionable educational value, some resembling corporate advertisements rich with product placement -- is also part of the problem.
Then, there is the push to incorporate technology in the classrooms and build assignments around the Internet instead of relying on the traditional textbook and the dusty encyclopedia set.
"They're on the computer in kindergarten. Most of it is orientating, doing simple games," Hartley said of the new reality.
Just as parents search for the right balance between the dictionary and the spell check, the library book versus online resources, teachers have an equally challenging balancing act, says Susan Gibson, education professor at the University of Alberta.
"I'm not sure it's about forgetting the old and taking on the new. That part of the library experience (reading books) is always going to be important, but I don't think that takes away by any means what kids need to know to be successful in the global, connected world," said Gibson, who studies the way educators integrate the Internet into their teaching.
John Willinsky, a technology-in-education specialist at the University of British Columbia, said there is also merit in these more general searches, as longer as it's accompanied by information literacy so students can filter out the junk and differentiate between sales pitches and reliable lessons.
"Students are having to be more discriminating than with the textbooks. We're encouraging students to use multiple sources and it's forcing us to create more critical readers than when we had textbooks or encyclopedias," said Willinsky.
Besides, he said, the Web has opened up a whole new world of primary sources for students, including speeches of long-deceased political leaders or diaries of regular Canadians who lived at the beginning of the 20th century.
"At a time when school library budgets are being cut, this opens up a whole new door of resources and resources the schools never had. The textbook had a way of homogenizing. The textbook was not the most exciting source."
Virginia Hartley, for one, is standing her ground. "The computer is not going to make the kids smarter."
