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Today's student is no longer limited to a history text as a main source of information. The Internet offers an increasing library of online primary sources. As students go online seeking information on an assigned topic, they are likely to find sources that contradict, corroborate, or question theories presented in the textbook. At a time when state standards mandate that students be able to differentiate between primary and secondary sources, the need to go beyond the text has become a genuine one. By mandating that students work with primary sources, the state is encouraging students "not to just study history, but to investigate it (Podany, 1997, p.147)." While it has always made sense to allow students to construct meaning in history the same way historians do - by going to the sources, it has not been until the arrival of the Internet that teachers and students could easily access the primary sources that make personal interpretations of historical events possible. Many national and international museums and archives are digitalizing their collections of documents, letters, diaries, artifacts, and photographs at an escalating rate. The Library of Congress, for example, offers an extensive online assortment of primary documents. Students can log on to the Smithsonian website and read first-hand accounts of the Woolworth's sit-in, or from the National Archives and Records Administration site, read the telegrams and letters Jackie Robinson sent to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, or from the PBS site, read diary accounts from Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery. From an incredible assortment of sites and sources, students can reconstruct history through the eyes and accounts of ordinary people, as opposed to what historian/film producer Ken Burns refers to as the "top down" accounts found in textbooks (Monk, 1994). This year, a handful of high school districts in California and Illinois will have a unique opportunity to put a face and voice to the study of the Holocaust. Film producer Steven Spielberg will be making available to educators via the Internet thousands of Holocaust survivor and rescuer interviews conducted by his Shoah Foundation (Foundation, 2001). Several schools have received grants to allow for video conferencing with Holocaust survivors through the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance. These two organizations are dedicated to providing students with information and helping them gain an understanding of why it is important to study the past. They offer extensive training sessions to educators on the appropriate use of their resources (Tolerance, 2001). Not all campuses have the hardware, software, or staff development in place to allow their students the type of structured and safe access to information described in the above paragraph. There will be students this year who begin their research project on the Holocaust by going online and searching for sites. Some of these students will find sites claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax. Unfortunately there is no quality control in cyberspace. Will these students have the tools to do the research, to evaluate the information, and to act on that information? Will they begin their research with the competencies Irving describes as essential: critical thinkers, competent readers, perceptive questioners, resourceful information searchers, skilled information handlers, and accomplished presenters (Pickering-Thomas, 1999). In his article "The Web - Teaching Zack to Think," Alan November discusses the need for schools to teach strategies for online searching, for deconstructing URLs, and for validating information. He too is concerned that a student researching the Holocaust might come across articles such as the one written by Holocaust denier Professor Arthur Butz from Northwestern University. Unless students are taught to analyze a URL, they might not realize that part of the address for Butz's website contains a tilde (~), indicating his is a personal web page, not a university sponsored page. If students know how to research the author's background, they might begin to question if a professor of electrical and computer engineering would necessarily be qualified to write on a historical event. November argues, "To survive in the future economy, kids must learn how to research, publish, and communicate working with the Internet and other information tools (November, 1998)." As students increasingly rely on the Internet for information, schools must teach students how to search for and evaluate information.
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