The digital world we live in today has drastically changed both how we receive information and the different types of information we receive. It has never been easier to learn something new or to find the answer to any question we may have. Using Internet search engines like Google, we can find hundreds, even thousands or answers to any question we may have within seconds. There are both positives and negatives to this massive amount of information now available in the digital world. The positive is the vast amount of information that any individual can easily access. However, as history educators, this overwhelming amount of information available with the simple click of the mouse presents certain challenges in presenting the past.
The main challenge that the digital world presents for history educators presenting the past is that anyone can post whatever information they want online, whether or not the information is factually correct. As Sam Wineburg states in his 2016 article “Why Historical Thinking is not About History,” “The Internet has obliterated authority. You need no one’s permission to create a website. We live in an age when you can practice historiography without a license.” (14) While there are many online websites that do provide quality historical content, there is also a large amount of websites that do the exact opposite. The internet has created a space where anyone can create a website in which the individual or group responsible for the website, can make any historical claim they want no matter how inaccurate or lacking historical evidence the claim may be. This creates a problem for individuals conducting historical research using the Internet. As Wineburg goes on to discuss in his article, “The most critical question facing young people today is not how to find information. Google has done a great job with that. We’re bombarded by stuff. The real question is whether that information, once found, should be believed. And according to some recent studies, young people are not doing so well in that department.” (15) The problem is that when conducting a Google search, the websites that appear at the top of the search results are not always the most reliable or even contain accurate historical information. For students conducting historical research this presents a major problem if they are only viewing the websites at the top of the search results that contain information that is not historically accurate.
For history educators, the historical inaccuracy of some information presented on websites poses a challenge to the way that they present the past. The question is how to history educators combat this vast amount of historically inaccurate information available to anyone in mere seconds. The solution is not to simply tell their audiences to avoid the Internet for historical information, as this dismisses the vast amount of historical information on the Internet that is accurate and can be used for historical research. Instead, history educators should teach their audiences the skills of historical thinking and how to use them to assess the quality of the historical information found on a website. This would include teaching members of an audience to look at who the author/owner of a particular website is and what sources are used to support whatever historical claims the website makes. By teaching the skills of historical thinking, history educators can help individuals to determine what information on the Internet is historically accurate and what websites are best to use for historical research. By doing this, history educators can begin to combat the challenges that the digital world has created in presenting the past.
