Children, Teenagers, and the Web

摘要

The rapid penetration of the Web into schools, libraries, and homes since the mid-1990s has opened many opportunities for children and teenagers to enrich their educational, leisure, and social activities. It has also raised issues concerning young people's access to the Web; its educational efficacy; and its potential to foster social isolation, undermine moral well-being, and threaten personal safety. These developments have encouraged research in a number of disciplines to answer such questions as who is using the Web, for which purposes is it being used, what educational role can it play, how can it most effectively be exploited as an information resource, and how can its potentially negative aspects be countered. To date, however, little has been done to synthesize such research, although a good start has been made by Abbas (2003) in her article published in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Such a synthesis is complicated by the very broad scope of the topic, the multidisciplinary nature of the research literature, and the uneven international distribution of research data.