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Review
| History on the Web: Using and Evaluating the Internet, by Andrew McMichael. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2005. 82 pages. $8.95, paper.
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| As history educators, we are concerned with teaching students not only how to think historically but also how to find authentic and reliable sources for historical study and research using the web. The internet has brought both benefits and challenges to our classrooms as we try to figure out ways to help our students separate the wheat from the chaff. Because the internet is so vast and complex, the task continues to get harder. Although students may have considerable skills with computers, this skill does not necessarily translate into classroom applications. They may have a comfort zone that includes text messaging, but not necessarily essays that are long, thoughtful, and filled with complete sentences. Students have come to expect instant access to sources and success in using them, and all too often lift paragraphs and whole essays. Their habits should make it easy to spot plagiarism from the net because at times they simply google their paper topic and copy one of the first sources they find, or at most, pick a source from the first page or two of results generated to their computer screen. Often, however, because our own computer skills were not acquired as soon in life as those of our students, we may not discover plagiarism in its more subtle forms. In general, we may not know what we can properly expect from students in regard to utilizing the vast resources of the internet to enhance their study of history. |
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To assist us and our students in our efforts, this short book by McMichael is an excellent place to start. It can be purchased alone or as a package with any of the other numerous history works available from Harlan Davidson. The author grounds his work in a brief overview of the history of the internet, a subtle way to point out to our students that the internet did not always exist, and then jumps to more practical matters when he examines the role of search engines in finding history on the web. He explains in plain language how the search engines work and how students (and instructors!) can develop their search skills to find what they are seeking. An important point to note is that throughout the book, the author discusses how to think critically about what is found on the web and how to decide which sources are reliable and which are not. This evaluation of sources should be an ongoing discussion with our students and underscores our need to teach students to think and critically analyze what they find so as to go well beyond simply reporting what they have found. Chapter Three deals with this issue most specifically and McMichael's descriptive analysis at this crucial point in the book contributes to the overall user-friendliness of this book. |
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McMichael's skill in achieving both a broad yet brief coverage in this work is well-illustrated in Chapter Four, where he deals with web resources beyond web sites. Most history instructors are aware, but most students do not know that much of the early historical material on the web arrived in our email and not on our color screens, and ways to access some of these archived resources are examined in this chapter. The H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) site is an excellent example of a wealth of information for students of history that, although does not always pop up using Google, contains numerous historical discussions among scholars and teachers that are useful even today. Finally, in the last chapter, McMichael discusses how students can put the results of their efforts on the web. He succeeds at dealing with some of the bigger issues without recommending specific software because, as he aptly points out, the best software is a multi-variable decision for both students and instructors. Teachers of high school history, perhaps even university instructors even at the graduate level, will find this work useful in enhancing effective student use of the web both in and out of the history classroom. McMichael's writing is clear and succinct and grapples with large issues and topics in an easy to read fashion, yet does not talk down to the reader—a difficult task in any book like this. |
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| Pittsburg (Kansas) State University |
Kelly A. Woestman |
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