CHALLENGING AUTHORITY: FACT CHECKING THE TEACHER

Does the Web Make Students Smarter, or Smarty-Pants?

As Leslie Chan delivered a lecture about the history of the United
Nations to his students at the University of Toronto earlier this
year, some pupils took notes on laptops, others dozed and one was busy
reading the UN website to verify the dates and figures being presented
by his teacher.

"After a couple of minutes, he pointed out to me that one of the
things I said was outdated," Mr. Chan said. "It was a good example of
fact checking, and I welcomed it. But he was so caught up with proving
me wrong that he missed the point of the lecture."

Like Mr. Chan, more teachers are having to prepare themselves for
confrontations with students who can find a second opinion or
contradictory fact at the click of a mouse.

This generation of high-school and university students have been
weaned on Google, Wikipedia and a sort of Web 2.0 approach to
learning, where information is easily accessible, interactive and up
for debate.

In Saskatchewan this month, a 15-year-old student named Kieran King
was suspended from his school after a series of events sparked by his
skepticism of an anti-drug presentation.

After watching a video on marijuana that he believed contained factual
errors, Kieran started his own online research project about the drug
- - and shared his findings with other students, to the chagrin of
school administrators.

Kieran's mother, Jo Anne Euler, said she is not surprised by his
actions because she raised her kids to be curious.

"We're big looker-uppers," she said.

"The kids hate telling me when they don't know what a word means
because they know that I will look it up and read all the definitions
to them."

Her son has taken this family predilection for accuracy online, using
the Internet to exhaustively investigate topics that interest him.

Ms. Euler said he would sometimes come home from school at lunchtime
if he had been told something he wanted to check.

Reached in Shanghai, where he is studying Mandarin and working as a
tutor, Kieran said he challenged the school's drug presentation
because of its lack of cited sources, as well as several specific
claims he questioned.

"The main part I remember from that video was a cartoon man looking
down his pants and being shocked," Kieran said via e-mail.

"This was signifying either impotence or, more likely, decrease in
genital size."

John Portelli, co-director of the Centre for Leadership & Diversity at
the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, said he has grown accustomed to students seeking out
information and promoting their own authority.

"They test me," he said. "I have to tell myself, here is the real
test: What do I do?"

Mr. Portelli said the traditional idea that teachers know everything
is problematic and promotes confrontational behaviour from students.

Teachers should be open to debate, he said, but also discourage their
students from "destructive inquiry," where they use the Internet to
bully or make fun of an instructor.

University of Toronto professor Mr. Chan, whose wife teaches at a high
school, said many teachers are unprepared for the challenges of a
wired student body.

"They shy away from it," he said. "Technology is disruptive -
cellphones in the classroom and all this buzzing around - and it
creates tension. We do need to learn how to deal with the technology
in a way that's acceptable to everyone."

Teacher training in Canada does not include lessons in dealing with an
interactive classroom, he said, or how to communicate with students
who seem to know it all. Mr. Chan said the curriculum of professional
training courses needs to be upgraded to deal with such scenarios.

When it comes to his own students, Mr. Chan actually wishes they
challenged him more - he says most rely on last-minute Wikipedia
searches to get them through a course.

"A lot of them actually get a little bit lazy because of Google," he
said.

"I spend a lot of time encouraging them to question and to question
constructively."