We should teach "web savviness" in schools

Thanks to the internet, there is now more valuable, fantastic, Earth-shaking, life-saving information at our fingertips than ever before: more specialists with views on tap, more facts, credible journalism, monographs and books. There is also, of course, more utter nonsense, ranging from the lazily wrong to malicious propaganda dressed up to look respectable.

A Demos report released last week called Truth, Lies and the Internet suggests that young people are not being equipped with the skills they need to judge information. Around one in four 12-15 year olds make no checks at all when visiting a new website and less than one in ten ask who made the site and why. We polled 500 teachers, and found many worried about the lack of their pupils’ digital literacy. They found that their pupils’ ability to check facts, recognise bias, and understand the difference between high and low quality information was well below average. Around half of the teachers had had arguments about conspiracy theories in their class.

Using the internet badly is a real problem when it is so fundamental to young people’s school and personal lives, and when they make decisions of real consequence on the basis of the information they find on it. Ninety-five per cent of the teachers polled reported that pupils brought information they found online into the classroom; 88 per cent thought internet-based research was important for schoolwork; and 75 per cent thought that internet content was important in the formation of their pupils’ beliefs.

At Demos, we believe that the answer (which is always easier said than done) is to put “digital fluency” at the heart of education. There are three important elements to it. Firstly, we need to teach the basic principles of critical evaluation, which are useful in any context: fact-checking, provenance, and weighing up different kinds of evidence. We also need to teach the special net savviness—how search engines work, how easy it is to fake websites—that is essential in the digital world. And finally, we should encourage students to use a range of different sources to avoid only imbibing one point of view.

This all seems obvious, but it is a formidable challenge. Teachers complain that the curriculum is already too full, that there are too many central government initiatives which demand box-ticking, too few resources and a lack of training. But education and the internet need to marry, if the full power of the web as a learning resource is ever to be realised. In this case, a marriage you have to work at is better than a messy estrangement.

Carl Miller is an associate at the think tank Demos. He is the co-author of the 2011 Demos report Truth, Lies and the Internet, and the 2010 report The Power of Unreason