Net or screen: Teaching how to assess Internet material for research purposes

As part of teaching French at the University of Western Australia and as a way of conquering the tyranny of distance, we have developed programs at all levels to make the best possible use of Internet resources available in French. This paper describes and assesses some activities devised at advanced levels to teach a critical approach to web resources for research purposes. These exercises encourage a healthy suspicion of Internet resources, an awareness of their limitations ('the holes in the Net') and suggest ways of appraising contents quality. However students' use of the Internet outside such classes is still fraught with shortcomings in terms of assessment of sources, referencing, reliance on the Internet as the 'only' source of information, and zapping without taking information in, let alone turning it into personal knowledge. I am suggesting that the activities I have devised will only be effective if they are part of a wider' education to images', itself dependent on metaphors for the Internet, a net, but also a screen.

French cyberculture

My approach here is experiential rather than intellectual, anecdotal rather than statistical since the effects of media on knowledge are notoriously difficult to assess satisfactorily. As David Gauntless says: "It has become something of a cliché to observe that despite many decades of research and hundreds of studies, the connections between people's consumption of the mass media and their subsequent behaviour have remained persistently elusive [...] due to a lack of firm theory"[1]. Theory on the Internet used as a research tool is still in its infancy.

I devote a lot of my time to explore and then inform students about old and new French cyber resources, existing indexes, and reliable websites. It should be noted that although the French initially lagged behind most western countries in embracing the Internet, due in particular to their very early adoption of a unique but limiting technology (the Minitel), use of, and thinking about, the Internet have recently expanded in an exponential fashion in France. The advantage of that late start is an abundance of quality websites, which often make good of advanced interactive technology, and which don't just replicate non-virtual material.

But access to French cyberculture is one thing. Researching it, assessing it, and interpreting it, is another. This is why I devised some progressive activities to refine students' Internet research and analytical skills with the overall objective to develop a healthy suspicion about, and a discriminating eye on, Internet resources as a database of information, in line with a critical use of other types of resources.

A pragmatic approach

1. FILL UP A QUESTIONNAIRE on French culture: (geography, history, daily life, popular culture etc) using some URLs I have selected, but which don't necessarily contain the answers. The most pragmatic questions ("what is the price of a postal stamp" for instance) are the hardest to answer, are of the socio-cultural nature students would like to know about. An opportunity for students to develop their own search techniques and question the tools that are given to them, the main objective of this exercise is to alert students to the 'holes in the Net", and the requirement to use other resources to complete their research (encyclopedias, Who's who, local French people, other students who have stayed in France or other French speaking countries). The Internet should be seen as one path among others within a wider information environment.

2. QUALITY ASSESSMENT: students have to explore a particular website, and find a way of assessing its quality in terms of contents, author, user friendliness, interactivity, uniqueness, language register, objectives. I then provide a template to guide them towards a methodological approach to quality assessment which they can compare with their own approach. If some points on inquiry remain without answer (for instance, "when was this site last updated?") students are meant to realise that undecidability in itself is a trigger for suspicion on the quality of some resources. I also provide some information about URLs domain names and (French) acronyms to distinguish between the strictly personal pages, and the official, institutional or journalistic sources.

3. RANKING: students are given short extracts from various web pages originating from both organisations and private sites and have to rank them by order of credibility/quality. This kind of activity encourages "to distinguish between texts spontaneously placed on the Web and those submitted to scientific or editorial screening stringency, making visible the status and origins of discourse, and granting them more or less authorial power [...] This is a fundamental condition to master the undesirable effects of 'information' found through search engines"[2] The objective therefore is for students to take into account the authorial signature, and apply rules of cross referencing if necessary.

4. VIRTUAL FRANCE: In this final semester-long exercise, each student is to create an HTML index of about 6 existing high quality French websites on a particular theme (Modern music, Political parties, Museums, School system...), writing an abstract in French on the websites they've selected, and referencing precisely the words/images etc. they paste into their abstract if at all. A one minute audiovisual presentation in French is shot by the student and included in each web page. Each student has to do a brief oral presentation in French of their own web page to the large group The set of all web pages is gathered under a general index entitled "France virtuelle", as an Internet resource for the class and other students[3]. This activity combines research skills, information gathering, referencing, and critical assessment as well as reading, writing and speaking.

Shortcomings of Internet use for research purposes

1. ASSESSMENT OF RESOURCES: As with other types of resources, they often lack extra knowledge to be able to assess website's authorial credibility. Besides, students very rarely use, as research tools, the interactive resources offered, such as emailing their questions or comments to authors, subscribing to newsletters, or joining forums or chat rooms.

2. REFERENCING: Even though the medium appears to herald "the end of the inviolability of the written word" ("La fin de l'intangibilité de l'écrit", Patino), students are not to 'forget' basic copyright rules and dangers of plagiarism. Apart from the illegality of considering as their own the words, graphs or images they have in fact copied and pasted at a click of a mouse, such actions show that students haven't appropriated the knowledge they came across.

3. RELIANCE ON THE INTERNET AS 'THE' SOURCE: After browsing the Net, and found a few references and websites, students assume their research to be over and done with. If they realise the poor quality or the arbitrariness of the sources, they still rely on them as what they perceive to be their 'only' resources. Conversely if they locate nothing on the Internet pertaining to their topic, they often assume that nothing more can be done, since there is nothing 'out there', overlooking other ways of gathering information.

4. ZAPPING: If I believe that strolling the Net is a worthwhile mental exercise, I also expect students to pause and read contents at some stage. Most Internet users will read no more than a text the size of one computer screen. Students have a tendency to keep on zapping, stopping for pictures, pretty animations, audio or video material, and in general going for breadth rather than depth. This trend is particularly detrimental when websites are word based, vast in page numbers, and branch off to numerous other links. Students miss the opportunity to learn from authentic French, lending credence to some critics' early fears that "computer literacy means illiteracy"[5].

In truth the shortcomings I have just described apply to all types of users, new to the web, mature age students - or even academics. But my contention is that it is mostly students who are not Internet beginners who tend to be shallow operators. In fact it is their very familiarity with the Internet that often makes them so. Brought up in the entertaining, chaotic culture of the web, they come to academic research with well entrenched habits and mind sets.

Metaphors for the Internet

The Internet as a "web" implies that it is indeed a quasi-infinite but punctured structure, a net full of holes with threads that need teasing apart to weave your own fabric. Alternatively, it can also be viewed as an organism such as a nervous cell dendrite or a rhizome[7]. But it reaches us via a screen, that is a flat surface where viewers project as much as is projected onto it by the authors. We come to the screen with our preconceived ideas, schematas and desires and, accordingly, interpret or miss what is actually there. A screen screens from reality, sometimes hiding something, sometimes protecting, sometimes deceiving as in the famous painting by Magritte, "This is not a pipe".

Endnotes

1. See David Gauntlett, "Ten things wrong with the 'effects model'", 1998. http://www.theory.org.uk/effects.htm [viewed 5 Dec 2001], also in Roger Dickinson, Ramaswani Harindranath & Olga Linné (Eds), Approaches to Audiences - A Reader. London: Arnold, 1998.

2. Roger Chartier, "Lecteurs et lectures à l'âge de la textualité électronique", (my translation). [viewed 17 Oct 2001] http://www.text-e.org/

3. See the resulting Index for 1998: http://www.artsmmc.uwa.edu.au/student_projects/1998/French208308/start.htm

4. Results of a survey carried out in 32 countries on 265,000 fifteen-year old students, evaluating their language, mathematical and scientific skills and knowledge highlighted the difficulty French students have in applying abstract knowledge to concrete cases, making them good at maths, average at French, and weak at science, compared to their European, Japanese and Korean counterparts. Although these findings do not necessarily apply to Australian students they are worth bearing in mind. See Gwen-Hael Denigot, "Peut mieux faire" ["Can do better"], LE PETIT BOUQUET, Le quotidien électronique de l'actualité française, nr. 1013 - Paris, le mercredi 05 décembre 2001.

5. Bernard Morrot, Presse, la grande imposture. Paris, Flammarion, 2001, 15.

6. A report requested by the French Ministry of Education on "Teaching images in the Humanities" underlines the importance of educating students to understand the images they view on television and the Internet, as part of a holistic education to citizenship. Le rapport de l'Inspection générale sur l'enseignement de l'image dans les Lettres 2001. French Education Ministry Report. [viewed 30 Nov 2001] http://www.education.gouv.fr/syst/igen/rapports/imglettres.htm

7. For the notion of rhizome applied to psychoanalytical readings of literature, see Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980.

References

Roger Chartier, "Lecteurs et lectures à l'âge de la textualité électronique", http://www.text-e.org/ [viewed 17 Oct 2001]

Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980.

Gwen-Hael Denigot, "Peut mieux faire". LE PETIT BOUQUET, Le quotidien électronique de l'actualité française, nr. 1013, 05 décembre 2001.

French Education Ministry, Le rapport de l'Inspection générale sur l'enseignement de l'image dans les Lettres 2001. [viewed 30 Nov 2001] http://www.education.gouv.fr/syst/igen/rapports/imglettres.htm

David Gauntlett, "Ten things wrong with the 'effects model'", 1998, http://www.theory.org.uk/effects.htm [viewed 5 Dec 2001], also in Roger Dickinson, Ramaswani Harindranath & Olga Linné (Eds), Approaches to Audiences - A Reader. London: Arnold, 1998.

Bernard Morrot, Presse, la grande imposture. Paris, Flammarion, 2001.

Bruno Patino, "Transmettre, réagir, se souvenir: le journalisme sur l'Internet". http://www.text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=8 [viewed 28 Nov 2001]

Thomas, B. (2002). Evaluating multimedia programs as a tool for language learning at beginners and post-TEE levels. In Focusing on the Student. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Teaching Learning Forum, 5-6 February 2002. Perth: Edith Cowan University. http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/confs/tlf/tlf2002/thomas.html