The dedication of the Rooftop ARTchives. When our students were asked to reflect on what they valued most about this year’s experience, they spoke of freedom, friendship and community pride in accomplishing something important together. Many thanks to the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and Archive-It’s K12 Web Archiving Program for helping Rooftop’s students to capture history in the making. a very real sense of their collective power and responsibility as the keepers of their own stories and memories.
Challenging adult authority may be the bailiwick of teenagers, yet when questioning the authority of the Internet, teens are not as skilled or tenacious. Web archiving presents a fun and whatsapp lead empowering way for my high school students to critically examine the authorship and credibility of the Internet, as well as identify what is historically and culturally significant. When this year’s web-archiving students began selecting and creating collections for the archive, I suggested they peer more closely under the hood of each site and object. What did they discover from their crawls that wasn’t immediately apparent from their first “reading” of the website? The following quotes excerpted from a sampling of the students’ final review and evaluation of the project reveal the type of discoveries made regarding their collections and the Internet in general.
The web is an extremely important factor in preserving things in order to view them in later years. The web, in my opinion is also much easier and more accessible to a wider range of people. While on the web, you have to be extremely careful on what you consider a reliable source.