Web Sites Will Bury You With Information
Could you adults leave the room for a minute? I need a moment alone with Today’s Youth.
Listen up, Youth. I understand that with school starting, you have a lot on your mind right now. What with haircuts and home-room assignments you probably don’t have any space in that head of yours for a lesson on efficient Internet search techniques.
Fine. Don’t think about it now. But jot these addresses down. They’ll come in handy later when you’re in a bind.
They’re some of the best search engines on the Web and they’re particularly good at churning up information quickly when you have not the slightest clue where to start looking for the Monroe Doctrine or the social structure of Mesopotamia.
To borrow a phrase from an old “Saturday Night Live” parody of the Macintosh, these sites offer “the power to crush the other kids.”
http://www.yahoo.com; http:/ /www.webcrawler.com; http:/ /www.infoseek.com; http:/ /www.mckinley.com; and, http:/ /www.cs.indiana.edu/aliweb/form. html.
As you’ve probably noticed, adults are constitutionally incapable of giving you any powerful gift without including an equally powerful lecture on responsible behavior. Now that you’ve jotted these addresses down on the inside flap of your Snoop Doggy Dog eighteen-pocket organizer, here comes the lecture:
Do not use those search engines as a substitute for complete, original research. They only take you to great source material, they don’t do the real work of analysis and assembly for you.
Your teachers may be a few megs short of a complete disc cache when it comes to Net-smarts, but when it comes to evaluating finished work, they’re not stupid.
When you turn in work that’s been cut-and-pasted straight from a bunch of impressive Net sources at far-flung universities, you’re telling them you believe them to be stupid. Bad idea.
They’ve probably seen 500 reports on the finer points of the Monroe Doctrine (dating back to the days Monroe himself was in their fourth-period class). A fast rip-and-read job downloaded off the Net is no more convincing than something copied out of an encyclopedia. So use those addresses - but do the work. End of rant.