About Maarten Sprenger

Maarten Sprenger is an educational editor, author and publisher. Slim Zoeken Online, focuses on understandable information about web search and the use of online information for school, study or work. A version for primary education is also available.

Search Literacy & Online Children’s Information

Maarten published two books ‘Smart Search on the Internet’ (Dutch: Slim Zoeken op internet) for children aged 8-14 (2013/2018) and develops a framework for search literacy as part of digital literacy.

2013 – ISBN 978-9082083309 / 2018 – ISBN‎ 978-9082083316

In 2022, when a new edition was ready, he decided to put all content online publicly, as print no longer felt adequate. That’s where you have landed now. Slim Zoeken 3, the online version is an independent, not-for-profit project. It’s free for everyone to use under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. You don’t even need to log in.

Maarten runs workshops and gives talks on finding and evaluating online information — for school, study and work. He does so at libraries and educational institutions across all levels: primary, secondary, vocational and higher professional education (teacher training included).

Short history

From 2019 to 2024, Maarten advised on search literacy as part of the Actualisation of the new national Core Objectives (Actualisatie van de nieuwe Kerndoelen), for the subjects Dutch Language and Digital Literacy.

Maarten was Lead Content Curator at edtech company Wizenoze bv from 2015-2021. He also spent a year and a half as coordinating editor at Schoolsupport, a children’s book publisher, working on non-fiction titles.

Since 2002 Maarten has worked in primary education, as a teacher and in art education. In 2006 he started the 8-12.info search engine.

In the years 1986-2002 he worked as a new media artist, organised art projects (television and new media). He was a lecturer at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and St. Joost Academy, Breda.

Publications in English

100 Queries: What do Dutch Children See on the Web?

Together with Carsten Schnober, Maarten Sprenger investigated for Slim Zoeken the quality and usability of the first ten search results in Google for 100 searches by primary school students. Carsten and Maarten have manually annotated the search results to evaluate the quality and suitability of web search results for a specific audience. The presented approach provides real-world insights into the web as seen through the eyes of Dutch children, and introduces a method that can be applied to various cases.

The paper was presented by Carsten at the ROMCIR in Lucca, Italy, April 10, 2025.

See github.com/SlimZoeken/100queries.

Children’s Information – Who cares? – A participatory observation and literature review of best practices from the field of information literacy and educational information retrieval by children aged 8 to 12 years. Published on the blog of Society of the Query, Institute of Network Cultures, HvA Amsterdam.

Contact

Maarten Sprenger mail [-a-t-] slimzoeken.nu
Linkedin.com/in/msprenger