'vikings NOT minnesota'

Our kids certainly won't learn how to get the most from the Web in a "computer skills" class, points out a commentator in the New York Times. "A teacher of Scandinavian literature at Berkeley recently described how students used the Web to research a paper on the Vikings." They were smart enough to put "vikings NOT minnesota" in the search box, but they were "perfectly willing to believe a Web site that describes early Viking settlements in Oklahoma," writes Stanford University linguist Geoffrey Nunberg in his must-read oped piece. To negotiate this bottomless, unfiltered pool of information called the Web, our children need to develop what Nunberg calls information literacy. That takes time; it's a learning process. We can't let what Nunberg calls "the legacy of the print age" (our trust in print publishing and the editors, publishers, and librarians who filtered it) or our delight in the convenience of search engines keep us from helping our kids question what they encounter on the Web (or anywhere). "Instruction in information literacy will have to pervade every level of education and every course in the curriculum, from university historians' use of collections of online slave narratives to middle-school home economics teachers showing their students where to find reliable nutrition information on the Web," Nunberg says. Maybe even before middle school! For more on this, see "Critical thinking: Kids' best research tool."