Computer beats an old encyclopedia

Computer Life column for 6/7/97 by
Richard Gordon

A couple of weeks ago, a neighbor called to me from across the street and asked if I had an encyclopedia her third grader could use. He had a report due on holidays.

I told her he was welcome to use the CD-ROM encyclopedia on my computer. She hesitated, not sure what to make of that response.

We stopped another neighbor kid and asked her if her family had an encyclopedia. "We have Encarta on our computer," she said.

Not having any experience with CDs and computers, our neighbor declined our offers, and took her son to the library.

My first thought was to see if our CD-ROM could have helped. I found information for about a dozen holidays and could have found more on the Web.

My second thought was, "Hey, my son hasn't had one of those time-consuming projects yet this year."

Well, it finally happened. My lad had a sea-life project due this week: pick a sea-life creature, make a book or poster about the creature and make a model, mobile, or some other creative representation of that sea animal.

Researching at home

Between soccer practices, work, school, and other obligations, my son and I knew we'd have to research at home. So, he put our copy of the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia CD into the computer and found a four-page article all about dolphins.

He had what he needed for the first part of his project. But he wanted to study more pictures of dolphins before he made his models.

He fired up Netscape under my watchful eye. I helped him find the Alta Vista search engine (www.altavista.digital.com), then we talked for a minute about what keywords to use.

"Dolphin!", he said. I reminded him that there was a football team of that name, so he added, "mammal." Then, on his own, he added the word "picture" to his list of keywords.

Next, I asked him if he remembered, from the last time we'd searched the Web, how Alta Vista (and several other search engines) let you indicate that the documents you find must have the words you are looking for. He pointed at the "+" key.

In case your son or daughter still has a project due, I won't give away all the Web sites our search for "+dolphin +mammal +picture" revealed, but my son was thrilled at the number of pictures he found.

He downloaded three of them.

The old way

While I watched him turn hot-dog-shaped clay lumps into dolphins, I remembered how I'd done research for projects when I was in grade school.

My parents bought the 20-volume World Book encyclopedia set for us. Need to find something? Take the volume with that letter on its spine off the shelf, practice your "ABC order" skills until you find your topic, take notes on a piece of paper.

With our on-line research, we'd gone directly to the information we sought, supplemented the information in our CD-ROM with a quick trip to the Web, and pressed the print key to get copies. It sure made this project much quicker.

But I also remembered a certain fourth-grader deciding to grab a volume of the World Book and a glass of juice; I used to take individual volumes of the encyclopedia and flip through the pages, looking at the pictures and captions, skimming articles that looked interesting.

There are times when I still prefer a book: for example, if I'm going to read for a long time or if I'm just browsing to relax.

However, given the explosion of information on every topic, electronic media are what we will use for research. More information--and more kinds of information--fit on one CD than can fit in three books. And you can retrieve specific chunks more flexibly.

Using the new technology will require that our kids go beyond "ABC order" very quickly. Even our youngest students must learn key word and search tool techniques so they can harness the world's knowledge instead of being swept away by its volume.

Copyright © 1997, The News Journal Company

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