The Internet has the potential to be one of the most exciting and useful research tools available. At the touch of a button, musicians can find information for programme notes, teachers can access lesson plans, and interested parties can find any number of items from pictures of lunar landscapes to rare eighteenth-century recipes. Many users now have free access and, for the first time in history, it is possible to send mail, sure in the knowledge that it will be received quickly and efficiently. Certainly, MusicTeachers.co.uk's office would be unable to function without it; in purely practical terms, we are able to find items for the news column, order new CDs and books for the reviews section, and look at a host of sites that contain information useful to us in the development of our feature articles.

But every great invention has its drawbacks, and the Internet still gains a bad press over a number of issues. There is a glut of pornography available, of which some is easily accessed by minors; hate mail, chain letters, fraud and espionage are all watch-words that have been bandied around the press recently, and pressure groups are rightly calling for the monitoring of websites and servers in an attempt to make the Internet a safe haven for all to use. We would all like to add our own list of potential drawbacks, but top of my list is the dissemination of poor and inaccurate information, a terrible danger to the foolhardy. Once upon a time, in the days of books (if I might take you back so far), anyone researching a topic would find information in a less attractive manner, by going to the local library, looking at bibliographies and indexes and cross-referencing these to the matter in hand. Although we might never have been certain if the information we read was correct, we would be able to rely on authors' reputations, book reviews or recommendations from teachers and friends. Now, the problem with the Net is that everyone who thinks s/he can type is able to publish something somewhere, and we are faced with the growing problem of information overload: how can we be certain that what we are reading is correct?

Having spent some time teaching at higher education levels, it has become clear to me that we cannot: lazier students, some of whom are very bright, submit essays that are clearly copied straight from someone's web pages, safe in the knowledge that I, using a different server and search engine, will probably never find their original source. What my students are incapable of doing, however, is sorting out the wheat from the chaff: we have all seen web pages designed by an adolescent of average ability called Sean, which contain his school essays. These are of little use to anyone, let alone a college student who needs to produce an academically-sound essay in a finite period; nevertheless, Sean's essay will probably be used by a number of others before the term is out. Perhaps this is the price we have to pay for technology, and until schools, universities and colleges address the problem of teaching students to deal with information overload, then perhaps we are going to remain prey to the half-baked ideas of any Tom, Dick or Harry. Although the idea of making the Internet available in every school and home in the country is a good one, perhaps the government ought also to invest time and money in specifically training teachers in its use. Only then will we be able to discern between the broadsheet and the gutter press Internet.

Editor