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Limitations of the Web as an educational environment. Having watched a lot of students pursue inquiry using the World Wide Web, I am a supporter of its use as a resource, but have some remaining reservations.
First among these is that it seems that it is easy to be uncritical of the tasks we assign students. Imagine asking students to spend four class periods reading the encyclopedia; it's not the kind of task that's likely to be very productive or stimulating. And yet that is often what students are essentially doing when they are set loose to 'do research on the Internet'. In practice, students do not seem to engage with material found when pursuing this kind of unstructured task, unless they are highly personally motivated by the topic. I would urge teachers to carefully look at just what it is that students will be doing during their class time using the Web.
Additionally, I am concerned by the effect of bias and quality in the material students use. In traditional school media center collections, the school media specialist provides a powerful filter of material selected for the collection. Her economic constraints may in some sense work to strengthen this filtering capacity; only a relatively few things make it into the collection, so selection criteria may be stringent. On the Web, as my eight year old daughter says, 'anyone can write an article about anything.' Often, the result is simply poor quality materials; in worst cases, material is not just bad, it is badly biased.
Limitations of this particular work. Any scholarly presentation has limitations, whether implicit or explicit. The most obvious limitation of this work is that it is not research-based. Although I rely on the research of others for a theoretical basis for the claims made here, and my observations are made based on fairly extensive experience, the categories arrived at and Web resources cited were not gathered by any systematic method.
The examples cited are not necessarily intended to be typical of the categories they represent, but rather have been chosen because they are especially noteable or because they are not widely known. The use of relatively few examples throughout this work limits the readers' ability to draw more general conclusions.
The goals of projects such as the Internet Public Library and the University of Michigan Digital Library are admirable; providing the sense-making structure of a library in the midst of the chaos of the Web is quite a challenge. On a smaller scale, bookmarks collections such as Steven Hadderlie's represent the kind of Web resource which might be created at local sites to help particular groups of students.
For myself, I hope to continue to evolve the categorization of Web resources for my own use and that of the educators with whom I work. My thinking in this area continues to grow and change; with your help, we can move ahead in making the Web a valuable educational resource for ourselves and our students.
