There has not been a post on GoldenSwamp.com for a few days because I have been in the Colorado Rocky Mountains visiting family. On the way back from Denver to New York City, I got an earful from a sixteen-year-old sitting next to me on how she does research at her small town public high school. It is a great school, she told me, in a town prosperous from upscale skiers who spend big money there every winter.
She told me the school policy is not to allow Wikipedia as a reference because, as she put it, “anybody can contribute to it.” Instead, she explained, the school provides students with databases. Twice she volunteered that the databases were “very expensive.” I asked her for the name of some of them, and she said Grolier (which I later looked up to find it is owned by Scholastic). I asked her if they also had Britannica at her school, and she said yes. She said that sometimes she went into the open Internet to look up something, but the teachers expected that she would just use the databases provided by the school.
I can’t help envisioning a small town in the high Rockies a hundred years ago. Gold mining would make the place prosperous, as skiing does today. The town would have a one one-room school with a small library that included sets of Grolier Society collections and the Encyclopedia Britannica. How can it be possible that the very bright and eager student sitting next to me in a jetliner at 36,000 feet can be directed to the same limited, siloed resources as her great-grandparents! I used them in the 1950s too, and they were great then. But these are different times.
Before we took off, my seatmate spent her time texting into the global Net; she is very connected, but not to the knowledge resources of her time. Interestingly, she did not respect the databases — yet bragged that at her school did all their work “digitally.”
