Meningen med webben - en studie om Internetsökning utifrån erfarenheter i en fjärdeklass

This thesis focuses on what the Internet can contribute to schoolwork, what search strategies the students use, and how they express their understanding of this. There were questions con-cerningthe differences between searching at school and searching at home. Reliability and critical scrutiny have been related to the students' models of the Internet system.The approach is ethnographic within a socio-cultural framework which has its roots in both Dewey's and Vygotsky's theories. The material was collected during a period of a school year by means of observations, conversations, questionnaires, interviews (both with the students and with the teacher) and reading documents. The aim throughout was to answer the research questions by finding out the students' perspective on the use of the Internet.The results show that according to the students the Internet is a place where the main activity is searching as such. The big difference between searching at school and at home is that you are often more interested in what you search for at home. Interest makes it more fun and it is easier to understand what you are doing. The students think hypertext has a logical structure which is easy to use. They say that they need practical knowledge when searching but also tools like interest, goal, knowledge about the source, and knowledge about what you are searching for. These tools help you to make meaning, which is important in the process of producing instead of just reproducing knowledge. The teacher tried to start out from the students' point of view in her teaching; she discussed things with them a lot and tried to focus their attention on scrutiny and reliability.The students have a clear picture of the Internet as connected computers all over the world. Their descriptions can be categorized as examples of three different models: Surrogate,Metaphor or Network, where the network model is often connected with greater reflection on the system. In my material the reasons the students gave for choosing good web pages and not choosing bad web pages were divided into three categories and related to their models of the Internet and how they talk about the reliability of the Internet. In the class there is interplay between these three aspects. The overlap is not total, however, which suggests possibilities for new learning and development in closely related areas rather than an underlying general talent.As regards gender, my conclusion is that boys verbalize more knowledge about the technology. This is well in line with earlier research, which shows that boys have a greater interest in technology than girls have. This, however, may be due to the expectations of the world around them rather than to a genuine interest, since there is no support in the data for boys using the computer differently.Barns informationssökning vid Interne