Encyclopedias vs. Google!
By mslena75
@mslena75 (561)
United States
February 27, 2010 10:06am CST
When I was a kid, my parents bought a decent set of encyclopedias to keep in the house. My brother and I were both big readers and pretty inquisitive kids, so whenever we had a question, they would send us to the encyclopedia to look it up. This was actually their strategy, as we were both voracious readers and they knew that along the way to looking up our original question, we would stumble across other things and read those too, so we were always learning. In this day and age, kids don't need dictionaries or encyclopedias, they can look everything up online. Do you think this is good or bad? I really enjoy the Internet but sometimes I wonder if it taking away from our kids not being able to 'stumble' over other things on their quest for learning. How do you feel?
2 people like this
7 responses
@chicago207 (57)
• United States
27 Feb 10
I think that kids should do a little of both because if kids did do that then it would be way better for them. I feel that if some one did take away the internet kids might not know some things that they do learn from the internet.
@mslena75 (561)
• United States
28 Feb 10
But the Internet is only valuable when you take the time to delve into what you find. Not everything posted on the Web is fact...much of it is merely supposition by random people. It is important to verify the sources you are using in the first place.
@olisaur (1922)
• United States
27 Feb 10
I had a really great 4th grade teacher- he had encyclopedias in the classroom and encouraged us to use them in the same way.
When I was in 4th grade, it was 1990/2000- right when the internet was taking off. It was kind of a weird time; it was almost like the teacher was unintentionally coaxing us to stick to manual/traditional ways of getting information rather than falling for the instant-search phenomena.
@reinydawn (11643)
• United States
8 Jun 10
I think that the internet is actually much better in many respects. Things in the encyclopedias take longer to get printed and are obsolete much sooner. I have had plenty of times when I've looked something up on the web and it's led to an hour or so of finding out related stuff.
@sukumar794 (5040)
• Thiruvananthapuram, India
28 Feb 10
Though the internet is a rich source of information, there is hardly any substitute for actual reference from authorized texts like the encyclopedia.
@hagirl (1295)
• United States
1 Mar 10
I think it is always best to have the accessibility of both.... If your computer crashes how would they get that paper done for the next day.... Besides it would be interesting to see how many times they pick up those encyclopedias vs. the internet in some form...
@danitykane (3183)
• Philippines
28 Feb 10
hi mslena75,
I think internet is a great tool for students to get information and variations of ideas. Since, internet information is vast that we can get wide and extensive details of just about anything, I think it is really helpful.
You can get information fast and with an ease. But as we all know some internet facts are not that as reliable as Encyclopedia unless, you would go to trusted sites where you can gather real and accurate data. Aside from that, kids that are being exposed to this type of media could grasp misleading information and other forms of cyber activities that we don't want them to get involved with. I think parents should always monitor their kids when it comes to pc use like placing some firewalls to adult sites.
I think it is cool to have both.
You can get information fast and with an ease. But as we all know some internet facts are not that as reliable as Encyclopedia unless, you would go to trusted sites where you can gather real and accurate data. Aside from that, kids that are being exposed to this type of media could grasp misleading information and other forms of cyber activities that we don't want them to get involved with. I think parents should always monitor their kids when it comes to pc use like placing some firewalls to adult sites.
I think it is cool to have both.
@savypat (20216)
• United States
27 Feb 10
The Internet certianly does have it's limitations, but it is wonderful when just looking for information. When we were young we were often sent to look up words in the dictonary and when doing so we were also required to converse on the word above and the word below, after many years of this we all had extensive vocabularies. But I still can't spell.
