The Brainiac’s Book of the Internet: How the Online World Works

Gr 3-6–Individual and colorful spreads scattered with tiny cartoon images, small chunks of declarative text, and occasional diagrams profess to serve as an all-questions-answered guide to the internet’s role in advancing individual and cultural knowledge acquisition and communication. In fact, the text is riddled with errors, including the date of the World Wide Web’s creation, the misuse of the word data as singular, and the suggestion that the kindness-coaching acronym THINK should serve as the acronym for evaluating search results (with no mention of CRAPP or SIFT or any generally used evaluation tool in pedagogical use for search discoveries). Instead of providing any credible search creation guidance, readers are told to ask a trusted adult for help or plug in the words they want to find in a result. Includes a handful of thumbnail biographies, brief glossary, and skeletal index.