\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0A line by English poet Alexander Pope has long impressed me: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried \/ Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I entered the computer-Internet crowd with some trepidation, wondering what advantage computers held over electric typewriters. At the time, the early \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc90s, my colleague Bruce Papier raved about the infinite possibilities of the Internet. He often bought programs for his computers and passed on to me several reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias that came bundled with the purchases.<\/p>\n
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0“Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you think you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be needing them? What if you want to read up on Evita Peron, or find out whether the uropods of crawfish are of the north side or the south?” I asked him.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Bruce insisted that all the information he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d ever need could be found on the Internet. He reminded me that at the time, estimates were that 65,000 new Web sites were appearing each day on the net.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Being “not the first by whom the new are tried,” I agree that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overwhelming the amount of information on the web, but what Bruce didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t explain to me is that one needs to know the right questions to ask, how to phrase them, and where to look. Remember, this was before the word “Google” became a verb.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Imagine that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re searching for a listed phone number for a John Smith, who lives in New York City. Likely his number will be there, but you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll need to sift through hundreds of names and numbers to find the right one. If all we have are a first and last name, where do we start?
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Back in the classroom this semester, I issued an extra-credit assignment in which the students were to answer some 30 general-interest questions. Unlike the algebra teacher who declares, “If you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t show the work, the assignment is wrong, even if the answer is correct,” I told my students simply to provide the answers, to show the product rather than the process. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interesting to learn exactly how the students found the answers \u00e2\u20ac\u201dmost of them used the Internet \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but the emphasis for this assignment was “just the facts, Ma\u00e2\u20ac\u2122am.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Over the years, this kind of exercise, which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve modified every year, yielded some interesting results. In the pre-computer days of public school teaching, one student said he simply handed the 30 questions to the school librarian and placed a dollar in her hand. Others scoured dictionaries and encyclopedias.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The slightly revised batch of questions I distributed this month can easily be answered on the Internet. But there are limits. “I got the answers on the net” is not a satisfactory accounting. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just simply “go to the computer” and expect instant answers.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The research topics are of the kind we students of Immaculate Conception School were expected to know, even if few of us had read any of the works. Once, an anonymous student stumbled over an oral question posed by Sister Mary Thelma. “Certainly, Arthur, you should know the answer to that one,” she said. “Well, Sister, that author\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only 4 years old and won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be writing that poem for another 37 years.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0That was no excuse.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Nor is it an excuse in my current class. One of the questions my students fielded was, “Who wrote \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Waste Land\u00e2\u20ac\u2122?” Some students correctly answered “T.S. Eliot,” but a few answered “Grover Smith.” As for the question, “Who wrote \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcCatcher in the Rye\u00e2\u20ac\u2122?” several correctly identified J.D. Salinger, but others ascribe the popular novel to someone named Robert B. Kaplan. And, according to some students, “Measure for Measure” was written not by Shakespeare but by Kenneth Colley.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In an attempt to learn why such far-out answers got submitted, I did a search of my own. One of the sites lists Colley as a lead in “Measure,” as Duke Vincentio. A search for “Grover Smith” reveals he wrote a critical review of Eliot\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work. And R.B. Kaplan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name appears as an author of a “Cliff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Notes” version of the Salinger novel.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Emmet Fox takes credit for having delivered “The Sermon on the Mount,” one of the 30 questions on the sheet. And how does Fox deserve such accolades? It turns out he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s written an interpretation of the Biblical account. The reference to Fox in relation to the Sermon on the Mount is one of 1,580,000 sites on the Internet.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Unless a Web page bounces up and announces, “Shakespeare wrote \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcMeasure for Measure,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122” it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s understandable why someone surfing the net may run across a number of names, each one a plausible candidate for the authorship of a particular work.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I shared this concern with daughter-in-law Connie, whose familiarity with the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcNet astounds me. “You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just grab the first name that appears on a Web site,” she said, “you need to ask the questions clearly and make some judgments in finding the answer.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0She searched for the first half-dozen items on the assignment sheet and came up with the correct answer, in minutes.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0For beginners, searching is akin to a scene in the movie “Class Action,” featuring Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as a father and daughter on opposites sides on a civil lawsuit. The trial judge rules that the defense, representing an auto corporation, needed to provide “all relevant documents” to the plaintiffs. Accordingly, the daughter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s firm delivered several truckloads of data, with the implicit message: we dare you to find what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re looking for in that pile.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0When faced with literally thousands of “pages” of prospective answers, aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we net surfers also being dared to find the information we need? Mercifully, because the questions are for extra credit only, no student will suffer for their answers, some of which are grossly incorrect. The needle-in-a-haystack pursuit appears to need some refining. And if that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happen, we could just go ahead and regard Kenneth Colley as the playwright for “Measure for Measure.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Besides, for centuries, people have been saying that Shakespeare couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even spell his own name, spelling it “Shaxper” instead. Therefore, for some, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an easy leap to insist that the Elizabethan poet wrote no plays at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0A line by English poet Alexander Pope has long impressed me: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried \/ Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I entered the computer-Internet crowd with some trepidation, wondering what advantage computers held over electric typewriters. At the time, the early \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc90s, my colleague […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}