Leah Graham And Metaxas 'Critical Thinking In The Internet Era'

In the article “Critical Thinking in the Internet Era”, by Leah Graham and Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, from Communications of the ACM, published on May 2003, the researchers stated that the students’ preference on using the internet to research information has made them susceptible to misinformation and unreliable sources. They found that students are incapable of verifying the validity of these sources as they allegedly believe sources on the internet too easily (Graham & Metaxas, 2003). However, their skepticism in using the internet for research has led them to undermine the critical thinking capacities of students who used the internet for research. This paper will provide the following supports: that the researchers tended to create generalized judgments towards the validity of certain sources, that they largely exaggerated the harms on

This survey’s goal was to determine how much students relied on the internet, what claims they believed, and how susceptible they were to misinformation. Results showed that the students primary tool was the internet, with only 2% resorting to traditional methods of research. According to them, this proved that students had a heavy reliance on search engines, and that they were also alarmingly susceptible to advertising, propaganda, and other biased sources from companies as seen in their likelihood to believe websites like Microsoft’s home page. There was some hope, however, when it was claimed that they were at least much less vulnerable to obvious scam sites where there was a clearer line on how unreliable they were (Graham & Metaxas,