On their own: students’ academic use of the commercialized Web, Library Trends 53(4

This article reviews research conducted in 1998–99 examining students’ perceptions and uses of the World Wide Web for academic purposes. Recent developments in the Web that may be of particular interest to educators and parents of students are considered. Since the mid-1990s the Internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, has been eagerly adopted by school districts, administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics indicates that, in the fall of 2002, 99 percent of public schools and 92 percent of instructional classrooms were wired for Internet access (Kleiner, Lewis, & Greene, 2003). This is even more impressive when you compare 1994 figures, which estimated that 35 percent of schools and 3 percent of classrooms had Internet access. The latest in a long line of technological solutions to our educational woes, the Web, and its evangelists, promise no less than a radical restructuring of the way that students access and acquire information. However, some have raised concerns about the value of the Web as an educational resource. Historians have noted that the use of the Web in a public school setting marks the first time that the end user controls the process of choosing the content to be consumed. To this end, critics have pointed to the incredible range of content accessible via the Web and its potential for distracting students from the task at hand. Hecht (1997) argued that “having the Internet in the classroom is like equipping each classroom with a television that can be turned on at any time and tuned in to any of 100,000 unrestricted channels, only a tin