Web research can fill gaps for students

Web research can fill gaps for students
BY LARRY MAGID
Special to the Mercury News
January 28, 2001

I was helping my son Will study for his ninth-grade social studies final the other night when he asked me if I knew the slogan of the French Revolution. I knew it had something to do with liberty or death but couldn't quite remember. We tried looking it up in his textbook, but there was no index reference to it. That's when I suggested we look on the Web.
We went to Google.com, typed in ``slogan of French Revolution'' and saw listings for a number of useful sites. We picked a promising one from the list, but it brought us to a long page with lots of text. To save time, we then used the browser's find command (Ctrl F) to search for the word slogan. Voila, the answer is ``Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood -- or Death.''
Google is just one of many research tools my kids use when they need extra help with homework or studying for exams. Google, like AltaVista.com, is a search engine that scours the Web for references to words you type in. Unlike Yahoo and Looksmart, it uses software to automatically track down Web sites. Yahoo and Looksmart use human beings to develop an actual directory of sites based on their relevance to the search term.
Another very useful tool is AskJeeves. The site comes in two flavors. There is a general site for older kids and adults at www.aj.com and a site aimed at younger kids at www.ajkids.com. The kids version is a bit simpler to use and has filters to prevent children from winding up on porn or hate sites, but, if your kids are in middle school or higher, I think they'll get more use from the regular AJ.com. What sets AskJeeves apart from most of its competitors is its ability to answer questions written in plain English. When I asked Jeeves ``What was the slogan of the French Revolution?'' it brought up a number of pages about the revolution but, unlike Google, it didn't immediately locate the exact page I needed because it's looking at the broader context rather than trying to find the string of words I typed in.
When I was a kid in need of homework or study help, my parents would point me to the 32 volume edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that still lines an entire wall of the house I grew up in. The only times my kids have used a printed encyclopedia is at a library, but they're adept at using the online versions including Britannica.com and Encarta.com. There are actually two versions of Encyclopaedia Britannica on the Web. Eb.com charges $5 a month (with 14 days free trial access) while Britannica.com is free. Although the free site displays advertisements and links to Web sites, they both draw on same text, which leads me to question why anyone would want to spend $60 a year for what they can get for free.
Speaking of value, you can still buy CD or DVD versions of Britannica, Encarta and other encyclopedias, but the Web version seems to have the same text material as the CD and DVD versions. CDs and DVDs will give you more multimedia material and faster access if you have a slower modem connection, but I prefer being able to access the information online. Not wanting to pay $49 to $69 for the disc is one reason but the other is that accessing these sources online doesn't require you to physically locate and load a disc as you do with the shrink-wrapped products. Admittedly, my family is somewhat spoiled because we have an always-on broadband connection, but even with a 56K modem, it's pretty fast and efficient to use an online encyclopedia.
Encyclopedia.com, which is operated by Infonautics Corp., offers 14,000 articles from the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Third Edition. Aside from having fewer articles than Britannica or Encarta, the entries are considerably shorter. It might be a good bet for elementary or middle school students but is probably a bit too concise for high school research. My other problem with the site is that the navigation can be a bit confusing.
My son Will's favorite study site is Sparknotes.com. This free site -- like the yellow Cliffs Notes books that I used to buy -- provides summaries of just about any book he'll ever be assigned to read. The notes, according to the site, are written by students and recent graduates including ``over 100 Harvard students and recent graduates.'' I know what some of you are thinking: These notes are a way of cheating because they let students bypass reading the books. That may be true, but they're also a good way to review a book and get a perspective you might have missed. Of course, no child of mine would dream of taking short cuts with homework, but Will tells me that they do help him get a better understanding of chapters even if he has read the book.
In addition to book summaries, Sparknotes also has information about most subjects. Type in French Revolution and you get five reports along with links to discussion board topics on the subject and archives of recent news stories that refer to one or more of your search terms. Subjects include history, mathematics, poetry, physics, biography, chemistry, philosophy, astronomy, psychology, economics, Shakespeare and biology.
What I like about Web-based research is that it gives students a broader perspective than they might get from their books and assigned readings, but that can also be a drawback because, unlike books and published articles, you don't always know who's behind a Web site. If a student lands on a site other than one operated by a major publisher or media company, it's important to find out a little bit about the author before relying on it as a source.