Mar
9
Response 7: Books and the Internet
March 9, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
Cuban Missile Crisis Reference Sites
Articles:
When the book? When the net?
Using Technology to Enhance Literacy Instruction
After reading Jamie McKenzie’s article discussing some of the shortfalls of information on-line I wondered if some of his assertations were still true. Is there really little information out there about historical events? With his article being written over ten years ago, I wondered what one would find by doing a very basic search on the same topic that stumped him-The Cuban Missile Crisis. My findings, some of which I posted into a list on trackstar, provided some interesting insight into the issue. Whereas Mr. McKenzie only found a smattering of information, my Google search turned up thousands of results. What’s more, what I found was much more extensive, information wise, than what he described as mere mentions and references. Were I a high school teacher approaching this topic, not only are there sites that give full histories and overviews, but there are a number of original sources, both written, audio, and video, located on-line. In many ways, most anything that might be studied in a high school class could be well suppported, even led, by on-line resources.
However, one thing he mentioned stayed fairly true, at least in terms of a basic search. Most all the sites were either government produced or from a university. In depth, independent research, is not as readily available. A search on Google Scholar turned up a number of resources for which previews were available, but to get the full text it needed to be bought (though now it is available in an on-line book form, as Mr. McKenzie called for in his article). This brings me to another thought, a posting I read a while back about the problem with free. With so much available on-line, basically for free, it’s easy to forget that by paying we can often get more in-depth information. When it comes to books it pays to remember that, as Mr. McKenzie stated, that by writing a book someone has already done all the searching for us, synthesized the ideas, and put it out there. Sometimes by paying the price of book we can avoid re-inventing the wheel.
