I admit it. I am probably preaching to the choir. Those of you reading this are probably already far ahead of the curve, far beyond the small steps I suggest, already leading your students in critical thinking exercises as you use the Internet in your online and hybrid classes. But if I can just help you reinforce one idea to pass along to your colleagues to help you justify your innovation, or provide one modest strategy for a class activity to help develop critical Internet literacy, this presentation will have been worth it. What follows are some approaches to critical thinking and the Internet that I have found useful over ten years of using networked communication in my classes.

I’d like to tell you what assumptions I am making about you. I assume that you use e-mail regularly, probably daily, that you participate in e-mail discussion groups on the Internet (you’re here, in the virtual conference, aren’t you?), that you e-mail with your students that you probably have a class e-mail discussion group, that you might sometimes chat with students online, in real time, that you probably have a class web page, that you might have your students make web pages. Furthermore, I predict that you have students who prefer to use the web to going to the library and that you have had students who plagiarize by copying from web pages.

I assume that we all have students who use the Internet, and that many of us have problems with inappropriate behavior. So I open Pandora’s box in the next section.

I have a big problem with the Net, the fact that on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. We really can’t easily tell who is who; we don’t know whether we’re talking to a 60 year old or a 12 year old, sometimes, and we can’t tell how reliable a web page is. On the Internet, it’s unlikely that there will be dogs, but there are some pretty intelligent robots, as we’ll see later. Who or what constitutes a reliable source?

Or, take for example another problem of the Internet, as capably described by Richard John Neuhaus,

"Partisans of the digital revolution protest that the Internet ... is interactive, not passive. But to the extent it is geared to quantity and speed of communication, it is interactive vacuity, a reciprocal fix to keep thought at bay, producing a global village of village idiots."

We have to ask whether the Internet is simply a vacuum, a mind-suck, some sort of crude trick played on society to make us think that we’re accomplishing something community minded when we are really just turning into a bunch of village idiots, mindlessly spewing out vapid and ineffective text. Howard Rheingold detected the problem in his 1993 The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. The promise of a great democratizing network in the living connections between netizens may just be a cruel illusion, a simulacrum of democracy designed as a decoy to keep people from getting in the way of "business as usual" politics.

For fun, and to contrast the rather optimistic thinking to come in this presentation, I will crank up my doomsday machine and bring up even more problems with the Internet, problems that more and more students and teachers will need to grapple with in the near future.

Do you ever wonder how much other people, businesses and individuals, can find out about you when you surf the web or innocently provide your e-mail address to an online organization? While we sleep, electronic spiders creep the Internet collecting information about any of us who chose to put things online. Further, no matter who you work for, if you use your institution’s computer system to send and store e-mail, your institution has a right to read your e-mail. If you work for a public institution, your e-mail to campus discussion groups may even be subject to freedom-of information requests. And just recently the FBI has created software called Carnivore to check through our e-mail for suspicious activities. In this digital panopticon, when we are not being watched, the potential for being watched is still looming over us.

Internet surveillance even comes to us in the form of free gifts. Have you seen the Cue Cat, a bar code scanner for your personal computer, or heard of Digital Convergence software? Have you seen bar codes popping up in newspapers and magazines in odd places? I recently received a bar code scanner and cable to connect my TV to my computer from the Digital Convergence folks, and hooked it up. They claimed to be protecting my privacy, but a month later they wrote me saying "OOPS, we goofed, we accidentally shared your shopping and now you will be getting spam." Your consolation prize is a ten dollar gift certificate at Radio Shack. Is your privacy worth $10? How much is it worth?

Have you ever had something you said offhandedly, but online, saved and used against you? Be careful, and remind your students to be careful. Much of what we say out loud is evanescent and can’t come back to haunt us. But written words on the Internet can and do. There’s a rule of netiquette that says you don’t ever copy and distribute to others something that was sent only to you, without permission of the person who sent it. But time after time we find that there are people willing to break the rules.

These are just some of the ways that the Internet is gradually allowing more invasion of our privacy. As our students use the net more and more, we need to confront some of these issues head on in our classes. We need to talk about how we can influence both the changes to individual and societal life that are taking place.

Now that we’ve seen how the prying fingers of others can sift through the dust trails we leave online, we shift our focus to the many channels of online media blaring at us through advertisements and web pages

For the remainder of the presentation, I’d like to talk for a bit about two ways in which we can apply critical thinking to the Internet: in terms of the information and communication coming at us, and in terms of the information and communication we can send out to the world using the Internet. First I’ll show how classes can look critically at what the Internet is forcing on us, then I’ll share just a few of the critical thinking tactics we might try so that we can use the Internet to our advantage.

Everywhere we hear about where technology "is taking us," but we might want to question whether it's advisable to "be taken" where those forces want us to go. In the back of our minds, many of us can still hear the insistent voice of the ATT commercial telling us that if we haven’t used a technology yet, we WILL. If, as our governmental, business, and institutional leaders seem to be saying, we're going to use the Internet in the schools, then TEACHERS have to be the ones to meet the challenges, to choose the tools, and to set the curriculum. It just isn't good enough to let students loose with technology like the web; we need to be their guides.

Take for example, a posting that appeared on ACW-L a few years ago:

In a journalism class, I required students to do background research on their story topics before setting up local interviews and writing the stories. The students had to find general background information from at least three sources, and I required students to use the Internet for one of the sources. Students described the results of their background research in an informal one-page report. I knew I was in trouble when one student provided attribution this way: "... according to Netscape, ....."

Or the following,
 

I was using a search engine to look for information on the subject of "diversity." One of the sites at the top of the list of results took me to this page: http://www.melvig.org/files/diversity.html .

In a hurry, I skimmed, critical reading mode turned off. At first I thought I was reading a thoughtful essay about racial diversity from the viewpoint of a biologist or ethicist. I cut and saved information about genetic similarity among all races but as I read further, I began to suspect that this might be a source I would not want to use. I went to the home page of the site and discovered to my chagrin that I had been about to use information from a conservative Protestant white supremacy group. Check it out at http://www.melvig.org/.

Many of our students believe anything they see, and they spend far too much time searching on the web due to inefficient search techniques and the distractions we all see when surfing the web. The anecdotes above are good examples of the traps awaiting the unwary on the Web. Rather than a connection to other minds and good information, could the uncritically-used Web be a sticky trap for the unwary visitor? As teachers, since more and more of our students are those visitors, what responsibilities do we have for keeping them safe and teaching them to research effectively?

The answer of course isn't in assuming, as do Cliff Stoll, Mark Slouka, and others, that the Internet is a waste of time and an ethical wasteland, so we should avoid it. I think that the answer lies in extending the notion of critical information literacy to the Web. We need to teach our students to be discerning of Web sources and to be aware of the potential for problems as information is shared in new ways on the Internet.

Of course, this company excepted, some administrators, and some teachers would claim that the Web really isn't the territory of our classes, that we should not spend time examining the Web in class. I have been especially vulnerable to such criticisms in recent years, since I teach English. But where else are students learning to use the Web effectively? Do your students have other classes in which they learn web skills? Most of mine do not, and I think that because so many of them are ALREADY going to the web for so much information for researched writing projects, we need to include Web skills in our classes. Indeed, many of our students will be writing Web pages as part of their professional duties in future careers, so it is not wrong to talk about credibility and design of Web pages in our classes if we care about our students being prepared for careers. Finally, if some of our administrators don't understand why we need to spend time with Web skills in our classes, we need to remind them that some students are falling through the cracks and will end up ‘in the breakdown lane on the information superhighway,’ to use a lame old metaphor.

Now that I have criticized the Internet thoroughly to come up with some critical thinking questions to raise with your students, I want to offer just a few strategies for working productively with Internet resources by evaluating webbed sources in your field.

But how, you may ask, do I teach this critical web literacy? For starters, you need to set aside some class time. If you have access to a networked computer with projection system, you can spend at least a class period on visiting Web pages that demonstrate varying degrees of credibility and effective design. You can bring in some in your subject area, and have students find others. I have provided links to several resources for Web pages to analyze on the Critical Thinking and the Internet Links page that accompanies this presentation.

To make the best use of the exercise, I ask the students to answer fairly general questions about what makes the web page a good source. In doing so, they develop their own rubric for evaluation, discovering why pages are or are not helpful, credible, or reputable for themselves. The rubric for evaluation is owned by the class; creating the rubric collaboratively helps the students feel a sense of their own responsibility and generates a sense of shared purpose, of class community. You can print the class rubric on a handout or post it to the class web page.

The lesson I use in most of my classes is also linked from the links page, but here I’ll give you a preview of just a few of the critical thinking questions we want our students to generate when they evaluate Web pages.

• Is the author identified?
• What can you find out about that author?
• Is she or he associated with a school, or with some other organization, and if an organization, is it a well known organization known for being fairly objective, or is it a group which might be inclined to political biases?
• Does the page cite other well-known sources or people?
• Has it been updated recently?
• Is it well designed, and does its tone of reasoning seem fair?
• Is it meant to persuade you? How?
• Is it mechanically correct?
• Does it have an even tone?

Evaluating Web pages exercises the critical thinking skills of evaluation and analysis, but creating web pages and sites makes students producers of knowledge; they learn by constructing a page or set of pages for themselves, for a collaborative project, or for the class in general. In the process of organizing and linking course-specific information on the web, they must ask multiple-system critical thinking questions about their purpose, audience, and content. By developing a Web page, students can discern what’s important about the topic, how it fits together, how it might be applied to practical purposes, and how to represent it effectively for a particular audience.

Take a look at some of my students’ pages from my Writing for Electronic Media class.

For students who have trouble getting ideas out on plain 8 1/2 by 11 paper, webbed writing can offer a fun and interesting alternative for demonstrating knowledge. Further, students can demonstrate their information-gathering abilities by linking to appropriate outside resources. Overall, since so many careers require some facility with Web pages, we are helping students develop professional communication skills.

Most of you are familiar with the move toward portfolio assessment; many of the college accrediting organizations are now recommending them. Some teachers and programs have discovered that Webbed portfolios, also called Webfolios, are preferable for those who want to share multimedia projects, and make samples of their work available easily to outside audiences, like prospective employers. More and more of our students will be expected to have a webbed portfolio at the time they apply for jobs, especially those who want to work in the computer, web design, or dot com field.

Take a look at my student’s webfolio. When discussing the design and content of the site, the class had to consider all kinds of critical thinking questions relating to audience, scope, and privacy. For example:
 

• Should you put your picture on a webfolio? Why or why not?
• Do you want your address and phone number there for all to see, or is an e-mail link enough?
• Should you have links to outside sites or your more personal website, the one you keep for family and friends?
• Should the site be password protected, only available to those you want to see it?
• If you use a website template, what assumptions are being made about your purpose and audience by the designers of that template. Is it appropriate for your audience and purpose?

Separate from the Web, but perhaps as a result of the Web's bringing so many new netizens on line, we find more and more students tapping the living database of the Internet: that is, asking questions of experts or groups of experts in Internet discussions in order to gather information and do research. Unlike the Web or a library catalog, but like the primary research we do in interviews and questionnaires, in e-mail or an Internet discussion group, we can actually interact with living human beings to get answers to questions or brainstorm solutions to problems. Students now have access to what Howard Rheingold calls the "grassroots groupmind" of people connected and actively helping each other on the net.

BUT... our students don’t always have the skills to interact with others on the net as effortlessly and as politely as we do. Without guidance, they will write error-ridden messages to professional discussion groups, asking for pity and answers because their teacher has assigned them to ask questions on the Internet. Those of us who frequent professional discussion groups know that such messages would rarely get responses, but we also know that students who can submit strong messages with few or no errors, a focused question, and a businesslike tone are more likely to get results. When we discuss these messages, our class focuses on questions of credibility and professional attitude. I remind my students that as members of an academic community, they need not even focus on the fact that they are students. A student might simply say that he or she is at Northern Illinois University researching a particular problem and needs information on a specific question.

This is a question not only of credibility, but of netiquette. That is, just as we want students to understand, navigate, and evaluate web pages, so do we also want them to understand the give and take and the rhetorical conventions of posting to a discussion group. If we decide that our students can and should join and post to Internet discussion groups, then they need to discuss the discourse conventions of that group with the class, and have their potential posts checked by other members of the class and the instructor before they can be sent. We have to make certain that students understand that a message that obviously comes from their school reflects not only on them, but on the school, and even on the question of whether it is acceptable that instructors ask students to participate in these groups. Much is at stake, and if students and teachers know that if they offend others, they will soon become persona non grata in discussion groups, they may use professional discussion groups only with utmost care. We have to remember our classes have the potential to crush or alienate the very discourse communities in which we would like to take part.

Most of you probably already use online class discussion groups to tap student expertise, to accommodate various learning styles, and to make use of different cognitive and reflective skills as students engage with class materials and critical thinking questions. Most schools now have courseware programs such as WebCT that have an integrated discussion group feature. Others make use of e-mail discussion group programs such as HyperMail, listproc or majordomo. Our school uses uses WebBoard, from O’Reilly. At my former school, I had success using HyperMail, which automatically archived the messages to the class web page.

Compared to spoken class discussion, when students write, they consider longer, and reason more fully about a subject. They can see and express a range of opinions on a subject. They make reasoned challenges to each other, and the lack of hurry in discussion means that those who might be slow to respond in face-to-face discussion can get a word in edgewise on the class discussion group. My student Jeff’s postings illustrated this; In class discussions we didn't know much about what he knew or how he felt, but we found out on the discussion list.

I have also had success encouraging my students to think critically about a topic by having them discuss and brainstorm online in a chat room environment. These days we are probably most familiar with the Instant Messaging that goes on semi-secretly while we try to teach in the computer lab, but we also have access to a wide range of tools designed for synchronous textual discussion. Daedalus, Norton, and other companies make software such as Interchange for local chats, and WebBoard has its own Internet Relay Chat for local or long distance discussion. But it's also free and easy to use a MOO, which stands for Multiple User Dimension, Object Oriented.

If you have never seen a MOO, just think of a chat room that contains descriptions of rooms, people, and objects. Not only can you have your students chat here, but you can also have them meet students from other classes, or meet with experts, or have them create interactive worlds in text. I like to have students try synchronous conversation sometimes, especially for brainstorming together on papers or projects. I find that the necessity of participating pushes some students into contributing ideas even if they are not sure of them, and that sometimes a rare form of synergy emerges, when students build on what others say to create new ideas and structures of thought. Order emerges suddenly and sometimes miraculously from a conversation that may look on screen or on paper like barely-controlled chaos, in a process Martin Rosenberg has compared to self-organizing systems and jazz improvisation.

Furthermore, in the MOO environment, not only can you chat, you can also create rooms, objects, and automated talking characters (called bots) in text. So many teachers have had success asking students to create a room about the particular topic being studied, to create automated characters who teach the subject, and to write room descriptions that also reflect the students’ knowledge of the topic. For example, Leslie Harris had his students at Susquahenna University design an online Dante’s Inferno that reflected their understanding of the text they were studying. The bots they created told an interactive story that demonstrated what the students had learned.

The MOO seems like an ideal medium for creative writers who can create worlds in text with all the beauty of a good poem or story, making use of the same creative imagination that allows us to enjoy an exceptionally good novel. But writing in the MOO is also a kind of social construction, which sets the stage for higher level critical thinking about academic subjects. Biologists can create rooms that describe the functioning of an organism as you travel through it, and psychologists can create bots that demonstrate common mental illnesses. Or, like ELIZA, the famous computer software shrink of the 70s, MOO bots could give stressed out people someone to talk to and allow them to air their feelings to a non-threatening, non-human program. Writing tutors at the University of Illinois, Chicago, are using bots as interactive online helpers for the most common writing problems their students encounter.

Adventurous teachers can make students in the chats anonymous and stimulate critical thinking by giving out characters in a controversial debate or event and having the students invent and role-play the ideas and words that might make sense in that context. For example, students can be assigned different characters or positions in the debate over school prayer, or assisted suicide, and able to express themselves without the pressure of their identities being known. Or they could participate in less controversial historical debates with their identities known.

You can probably see some obvious advantages for those of us interested in getting students to write. Most of what goes takes place on the Internet is conducted in writing, even now when speeds and compression ratios allow a lot more multimedia to be sent quickly across the wires. Many argue that students don’t do much critical thinking about the kinds of crude, ultra-slang writing, like "R U M or F?" that we often see in chat rooms and casual E-mail. Yet, when their teachers take a proactive yet critical stance and discuss issues related to language and the net, urging them to use networked conversations as the basis for more serious projects and presentations, they may learn much from the experience.

Lest you think that I am unaware of the problems students and teachers may have with MOO and chat environments, let me just say that I understand that the learning curve can be rather steep for some people. The sense of disorientation from being set adrift in a seemingly endless, disorganized river of text scrolling down the screen can be severe, but I am fond of making a connection from this sense of disorientation to the teachable moment. When students have experienced the chaos, I use the cognitive dissonance of the situation to ask them to reflect critically upon what conventional cues and organizational structures are missing from the MOO conversation. I also ask them to see whether they can detect alternative cues and organizational systems when we examine a MOO transcript together on paper or the overhead projector. We discuss strategies to cull the important information from the general hubbub of the MOO conversation. It is then easy to connect these MOO-based survival strategies to more general discussions of survival skills in print-based reading and research, such as skimming texts for key words and central ideas. But these strategies are the subject of another presentation, Fear and Loathing In Paradise, Making use of Dissensus, Disorientation, and Discouragement on the MOO.

Most of you probably already do most of what I have described in your classes, so my very modest proposal would be to ask you to spread the word to your colleagues that students in our classes need to learn web navigation, web searching, and evaluation of sources on the web at some point, as well as the netiquette and decorum to compose polite and professional e-mail messages to individuals and groups. To the degree that they have time and interest, your colleagues might also benefit from having students create web pages and take a more active role in online discourse. In so doing, students and teachers are helping to shape an exciting new online world through critical thinking about audience and context.

Don't forget our colleagues in the secondary schools, who, according to a recent survey, are generally too busy to use the Internet in their classes. Through partnerships with K-12 teachers, college faculty can help their secondary colleagues learn and integrate appropriate technologies for professional development and effective teaching.  Busy as we are, we need to reach out, to forge relationships that help students at all levels make sense of the Internet tide sweeping through our lives and work.

And finally, I urge that we as educators do what Cindy Selfe recommended in her Chair's address to the CCCC a few years ago; that is, that we PAY ATTENTION to the ways in which technology insinuates itself into our lives and our classes. Big business and now especially governments are pushing technology in the schools, but we need to look at what they have to offer critically. We educators should be the ones to decide what technologies we use and how, and to evaluate the benefits and problems. We should be the ones to create, innovate, and collaborate with our students. But we must also have the courage to say no, when certain technologies aren't appropriate, and to offer students multiple ways of completing assignments, not just one magic bullet technological application. We have to take control of the technology.

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