When I was a kid, we had two options for researching things. One was to look them up in the set of Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia that we owned, published in 1973 and purchased soon after my parents married. It worked well for things that were truly "history" -- Marie Curie had long since done her research, and President Lincoln's legacy was well-established. You just had to hope you didn't need anything discovered since the Nixon administration. The alternative was the library. If you were lucky, you could find what you needed at a local branch, otherwise you trekked up to the Northeast Regional building. If you were in need of really obscure information (I will never forget my Senior year AP History research paper - I had to compare/contrast the history of numerous WWII German concentration camps), you made the trek into Center City and the Central Library.
Fast forward 20 years. Luke now does research on his phone. The other day, he and I were on our cellphones working out some tough homework questions. He was at school, waiting for Neal to pick him up, and I was at home. We were using speakerphone to talk and texting to clarify spelling, while he simultaneously researched the questions on the same device. The homework was to complete a crossword puzzle -- he was able to take photos of it, text them to me, and I printed them out (using a Wifi connection) so that we were able to keep our clues and answers organized. I admit, I was "only" talking and texting with my phone, as I was simultaneously using the desktop computer to Google information, making Jude a hot dog, and fielding the washing machine repair guy.
Looking back at the last couple years, it amazes me how much things have changed. To my kids, the "library" is "that building you took us to a couple summers ago." Now we borrow books electronically. (I think it's great -- I don't have to remember to return it because it just times out and disappears, plus if Celia finishes a book "after hours," she can keep on reading because I can get her another within minutes.) If they need to look things up, they have the whole WORLD at their fingertips -- or at least, the whole World Wide Web!
Examples of things we have done with most, if not all, research via the internet:
How to build a catapult that will launch lightweight objects...
That becomes the prototype for a catapult project that, with further research, earns Honorable Mention in the school science fair.
Nearly all of the background research for Luke's airplane project -- that took First Place in the county college science fair.
Even the little boys get the benefit of the Internet....
Where to go apple picking...
And Mom's online friends at the Kids with Food Allergies Foundation for ideas how to make cookies out of nothing but potatoes and apples.
From my point of view -- the best thing about having the internet at home is not being beholden to another facility's opening hours. We could research Matthew's most recent project at our "leisure" (read: long past 5 pm one weeknight, and 8 am Sunday morning). We also didn't have to have rolls of dimes to make black-and-white copies of things we might need; we just "pinned" them to a Pinterest board and came back to them when we were ready to do more careful research. We also could print out color pictures from medical journals, so we had good illustrations to model ours on.
There are LOTS of other things we use the Internet for (my husband teases I don't have to singlehandedly help Amazon meet their quarterly earnings projections...), but tonight, I'm thankful to have it to do research. 24-7 access to accurate and up-to-date info? Yay for technology.
No comments:
Post a Comment