Stanford University professor Dr Sam Wineburg was the second speaker in Texas A&M University at Qatar’s (Tamuq) 2015-2016 Distinguished Lecture Series.
Tamuq interim dean Dr Ann Kenimer introduced Dr Wineburg, who is the founder and executive director of the Stanford History Education Group and Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University.
In his talk, “Reading Less and Learning More: The Search for Expertise in the Evaluation of Online Sources”, Dr Wineburg discussed the skill of determining the veracity and legitimacy of online sources. In his research, he found that “digital natives” were the most adept at such a task, while “digital immigrants” relied on bygone practices of deducing, which do not translate on the Internet.
Digital immigrants - or those who existed in a pre-Internet world and then adopted a digitally literacy, despite any learnedness or shrewdness - tended to evaluate online sources only in a vertical manner as observed by Dr Wineburg in his research findings. They would observe and examine a site from the top of the page and then progress downward only.
Digitally native experts, or those who only know of a world in which the Internet exists, examined sources quickly. They would superficially look at a page and then immediately jump to another page to do a search about the page in question to get their bearings.
Dr Wineburg stressed the importance of an informed citizenry in a digital age and the responsibility of educators and institutions to ensure that students learn the skills necessary to evaluate digital information.
“No longer is the question where to find information,” he said. “The question is whether the information we find is worthy of our belief. What fell on the shoulders of fact checkers has fallen on us. Reliable information is a civic responsibility.”
Dr Wineburg’s research interests include new forms of assessment to measure historical understanding, the creation of web-based environments for the learning and teaching of history and longitudinal study on the development of historical consciousness among adolescents in three communities.