Sophia Ahn/The Daily Northwestern
Charged with answering 30 questions in 30 minutes, 26 Northwestern students battled for a $100 top prize and the chance to prove their ultimate Internet literacy in the Digital Literacy Contest at the University Library on Monday.
Wrapping up its two-month tour of college campuses, the contest evaluates students’ ability to quickly aggregate information from the Internet, said Daniel Poynter, the competition’s organizer.
“It’s alien to people, the idea of a contest to measure Internet literacy,” said Poynter, who graduated from Purdue University in 2008. “But nowadays we spend so much time behind computer screens … we have outsourced functions of our brain to technology, and people who can use (the Internet) effectively are very powerful.”
With three minutes before the start of the competition, participants began with trash talk – “You’re really using Safari? Really?”
Five o’clock hit, and screens throughout the computer lab became a sea of Wikipedia and Google, as participants raced to find everything from quotes published in The New York Times in 1851 to reverse image searches of cyborg photos.
Poynter said the idea for the contest came to him between his junior and senior years of college. He approached a professor at Purdue about creating a “Googling contest.” For the first contest, Purdue students wrote their answers on paper and were awarded prize money out of Poynter’s own pocket. Now, the competition is entirely online.
The competition is in the process of expanding to 500 high schools nationwide to “promote Internet literacy among teenagers,” Poynter said. The project was recently awarded a grant through the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition.
The competition does “double duty” by bringing students into the library and making them aware of the depth of online database resources available to them, Poynter said.
NU’s competition winner, Weinberg junior Adam Pumm, said he “couldn’t imagine life without the Internet” and spends about two hours a day surfing the Web.
“This kind of Internet literacy is very important just to be a responsible citizen in the 21st century,” he said.
Students at NU scored higher on average than at other universities, Poynter said.
But Weinberg sophomore Cassi Saari, who placed second, said the questions were still difficult – Saari said she wasn’t able to complete all of them.
“Some of them were really obscure,” she said. “One asked you to find the name of a person who edited a Wikipedia article at a certain time on a certain date.”
Poynter said he comes up with questions in reverse.
“Any time I find some Web site or factoid on the Internet, I make a note of it as something that people could be asked to find in the competition,” he said.
The competition reminds people of the “instant gratification” of effectively utilizing the Internet to answer questions, Poynter said.
“Ultimately I want to re-sensitize people to the cliché that the Internet is our most powerful invention,” he said.
