In his keynote address to the 2015 American Association for State and Local History annual meeting, Stanford Education Professor Sam Wineburg discussed one of the biggest challenges facing history educators in the age of the internet. We do not have a problem with finding information. With the proliferation of mobile phones and devices, search engines are at our fingertips. We can access needed information from maps, product reviews, encyclopedias and dictionaries online almost immediately. The more crucial issue we are facing is whether the information we are finding is accurate. How can we verify the validity of information? How do we know the sources we are relying on can be believed? 

Another challenge history educators face in a digital world is the gender bias we encounter, where women’s history is still far less represented than that of men’s history. Using Wikipedia as an example, there are still more men involved in the editing process than are women. Can we truly get accurate results from search queries for historical research if the accounts of women are not digitized, or debated and discussed as often as they are for topics related to men? 

Even in a digital world, it is still important for history educators to engage in historical thinking, and to check the validity of the primary sources we rely on for historical research.  We must teach our students and public audiences to pay attention to the platforms they rely on for their searches, and when possible to stick with more academic and well known sources for information.