Students need the freedom to explore their own learning and what we, as educators need to provide is the skill set to enable them to truely deepen and widen their own understandings.

Thanks for your comment. We are in the second year of our adoption of a 1:1 laptop program so most students rely on web-based resources to conduct research. Helping them develop the ability to be discerning readers/researchers is a vital skill. It’s not a new skill by any means but given that anyone can now publish material online, I think it’s more important than ever.
I’ve written here about how important it is that we, as teachers,adequately prepare students so they are able to recognise “misinformation” when it, inevitably, appears. The martinlutherking.org site is a prime example of this, written by a former KKK member to discredit and defame King as an “anti-America communist” using dubious, anti-civil rights government documents to present a revisionist, racist version of history.

I have been discussing this with our high school English teachers as we are in the midst of a construction project that will restrict our access to print sources for research over the next three years. Our reliance on web research and the ability of students to interrogate their online sources for validity will be tantamount to our success in this endeavor. I’ve pulled this post into my diigo account to use as a unit in a class I am creating in that department.