Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

The Pennsylvania Department of Education recently purchased netTrekker d.i licenses for all teachers, students, and parents in our state. Last week I attended a two and a half hour train-the-trainer session.

The Web search tool functions as an alternative to commercial free Web search engines and offers access to more than 180,000 online resources selected by educators, organized by readability level, and aligned with state standards.  The “d.i” in the product’s title refers to features that assist educators in differentiating instruction.  Searchers can begin in an elementary, middle or high school interface.  Specialized resources are identified for ELL/ESL students, those reading challenges, special needs and more. 

The product features an image search designed to guide students to “safe, pornography-free images to use in school multimedia projects or classroom presentations.” 

Don’t get me wrong. I am deeply grateful to our state. (DEEPLY GRATEFUL!)More than so many other states, Pennsylvania presents learners with resources to support their research.

netTrekker works pretty well as an educational search tool. But, as a “trainer” and as a librarian, I have some concerns about how I am to present the product to teachers, parents, and students.

Here are a few of the concerns:

First, I find myself comparing this Web search directory to my dear Librarians’ Index to the Internet (http://lii.org).  It is free.  Its editors have high standards for inclusion. It is meticulously indexed and annotated and gloriously structured.  While netTrekker may have features that are superior for elementary educators, it doesn’t match LII in terms of depth and sophistication. And my comparisons to KidsClick! (http://kidsclick.org/) and such amazing free library efforts as Multnomah’s Homework Center (http://www.multcolib.org/homework/) are similarly troublesome, though they may contain fewer links.

netTrekker’s initial result list does not always display the origins of the site.  Most of my free Web search tools allow me to view a url when I select a site. That url offers clues as to the site’s usabililty and appropriateness. I want to see it and I want my students to see those clues up front.  And my initital two-hour trial run of searches turned up more than ten grammatical and spelling errors in the teacher-created annotations.

As for indexing, controlled vocabulary, and result ranking, when I do a search on countries, I expect some quality information sources to come up first–Library of Congress Country Studies, Department of State Background Notes, Amnesty International rankings. Instead, nearly all results relate to country music and lead me to such sites as Dolly Parton’s newsmagazine and Shania Twain’s Official Site. 

What generally comes up first in netTrekker’s results are Encarta’s free concise encyclopedia, the Columbia concise encyclopedia, encyclopedia.com and Wikipedia content.  For high school level research, these resources hold limited value.  (Ironically this gift came just as I was writing an email to my teachers that I list below.) The brief entries that frequently appear in netTrekker’s results are hardly equal to the licensed resources we already provide for learners–http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/catalogs.html.

And though I know of many wonderful resources created by teachers, I have found that netTrekker’s teacher editors point to a number of not-so-special resources created by teachers, as well as lots of Geocities and AOL Members sites.  Many of these personal teacher sites do not list their sources. For instructional resources, I prefer such juried sites as GEM http://thegateway.org or Bernie Dodge’s database of WebQuests http://webquest.org/.

And so, when I train on netTrekker I will point to it as another tool in a student’s toolkit, one that should be used critically like most other search tools. 

Though it is linked to NCLB funding and is supported by NCLB’s Scientific Based Research, and though it may point to a significant number of quality sites, it is still up to the student, the teacher, or the parent to decide whether he or she is finding the quality or the content needed for the task at hand.  I will also continue to more heavily promote the very rich resources in the Access PA POWER Library http://www.powerlibrary.org/ that are not necessarily linked to NCLB’s Scientific Based Research.  I also hope that the editors of netTrekker will continue to improve their selections and their annotations.  I want to love this product.

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My recent email to teachers about Wikipedia:

I wanted to keep you all in the loop regarding the raging discussion in information circles regarding Wikipedia. Our students (and the rest of the world) use it heavily because it appears prominently in Google, Yahoo!, netTrekker (our new state gift), and Answers.com result lists. Wikipedia is a collaborative source. Anyone can contribute, edit, delete. It is vetted only by its contributors and its contributors come from all walks of life. Most editors do not officially sign their contributions. Few editors offer their credentials.

This week articles appeared in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04seelye.html

and USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm regarding Wikipedia’s often unreliable content–specifically a false and negative biography of retired journalist, John Seigenthaler.

The fact is that the information universe is in flux. For some topics in popular culture–Twinkies, for instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkies) –Wikipedia may be a decent starting point. It should NEVER be considered a final authority and I believe most professors would cringe if they found it cited in an academic paper. For most projects our students have far better materials to use. Please check your students’ works cited pages and question their use of Wikipedia should they choose to cite it. 

Update: CNN just reported that Wikipedia now requires article editors to register before they can change an entry. (http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/12/05/wikipedia.rules.ap/index.html)Siegenthaler was not impressed.

Update 2: CNN reports on the contributor responsible for the false Siegenthaler story http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/11/wikipedia.ap/index.html:

“‘I knew from the news that Mr. Seigenthaler was looking for who did it, and I did it, so I needed to let him know in particular that it wasn’t anyone out to get him, that it was done as a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong,’ Chase was quoted as saying in Sunday editions of The Tennessean.

Chase said he didn’t know the free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.”

Update 3: And then there is the recent Nature study in which Wikipedia does fairly well in a comparison to Britannica: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

To add just a little levity, don’t miss Uncyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncyclopedia, a content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit!  (Thanks to Jacquie Henry of LM_NET for pointing to the humor.) Quality, shmality?