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there will be more computer serving information than people on earth.

Information wants to be free. And information, being free is also dangerous,

destabilizing, and potentially deadly. Pierre Salinger's recent attempt to use

documents published on the Internet to bolster his claims that TWA Flight 800 was

downed by one or more US missiles highlights one of the fundamental problems with

the Web as a community of self-publishers: it is no longer possible for anyone, no

matter whattheir level of sophistication or education, to believe what they read, to

know, in fundamentally actionable ways, that we can act on the basis of information

and not do substantial harm to ourselves or others.

Toxic information is scattered all over the Web, in obvious and not-so-obvious

forms. Anyone with access to the Web can say anything he likes about any topic

without any credentials check. We need look no further than the fantastical conspiracy

theory communities thriving on the Web to be convinced that people who know

virtually nothingabout the history of the planet are hacking, dismembering and

reconstituting the world-historicalrecord with impunity, and for an eager - if smallish -

audience.

"We are raising a generation of children so poor in critical, analytical,

hermeneutic and historical skills that we will be faced, in a decade or so, with millions

of readers who are not able to differentiate between the veracity of a NASA finding

about life on Mars, and the phantasms of the Zeta-Reticulan fans".(Demarest)

The above refrains are common arguments against the usefulness of the Web

in education. They are also arguments, the just of which is, about substantiative truth

statements. Any suggestion that books, newspapers, magazines, radio, or television

are somehow more educationally useful then the Web, because their content is more

likely true, is incorrect. Arguments such as these miss the important point. It is truth of

methodological process, not substantiative truth statements, that will make teachers