Evaluating Internet Research

As more and more information is becoming available on the Internet we need to be careful of what we read and how we find our information. Most importantly, we need to be critics and have the skills to identify good sites and good information. As educators, it is crucial that we teach our children how to evaluate the Internet.

I really like Robert Harris's analogy of closing your eyes and choosing a magazine at the grocery store. I have never taken a step back to truly think about all of the information that is out there or all of the people who are putting information out there. I think Harris also gave to great checklists that would be easy for our children to remember:

1. The CARS checklist

• Credibility - who is the author?
• Accuracy - is the information correct?
• Reasonableness - is the information reasonable? What is the tone?
• Support - are the sources sited?

2. The CAFE' Advice

• Challenge - challenge the information and demand accountability
• Adapt - adapt your skepticism and requirements for the quality to fit the importance
• File - file the new information in your mind
• Evaluate - evaluate and re-evaluate regularly as new information will affect the accuracy

I also like the toolbox that Smith mentioned. It basically listed the same steps for evaluation as Harris, but in more detail. Since children are becoming more and more dependent on the Internet, we have to teach them to become web literate. We have to teach them the basics of critical thinking and how to search for good information.

In Alan November's book, Web Literacy For Educators, he teachers how to narrow your search. When using google, after your search you can narrow it by typing site: ".ac" ".uk" what I just asked for was a search that is limited to an academic institution in the United Kingdom. We can use and extension guide as well as country codes to focus on where our information is coming from. We can also find the history of a site by using the Wayback machine. I have tried this and it is truly fascinating. November tells about a site, www.martinlutherking.org, that looks like a great site for students to research Martin Luther King. However, if you look at the history of the site, the owners of the site, and assess the information of the site, you will realize that this site is owned and maintained by a white supremacy group called Stormfront, Inc. Students can use easyWhois (www.easywhois.com) and determine who an organization actually is. You can also use back links to see who is linked into a site. These are like digital threads that come from other sites. You can then determine why groups or individuals have linked into a certain site. Another good example (and a funny one too) is to have your students analyze a link by having them go to zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ which is a site for Saving the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. They can quickly realize this is completely unreasonable and they can look at the links and see that there are no links from trustworthy sources that prove the tree octopus actually exists.

I also was intrigued by the site http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/eval.html?step=0 for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I think this would be a good activity for students to investigate different sites and evaluate them.

The Atomic Learning tutorials also showed some great search information. Children need to know how to search by using search engines, meta search, and subject directories. I want my students to know that best sites to search and how to use them. I have used Nettrekker as a subject directory, but there are other good sources out there. I have never used dogpile, but it's good to understand what a meta search engine is. One problem my students often has is an overwhelming number of results when they search. Knowing how to use advanced search options in Google is a great tool for them. I think it's also important to understand how a search engine works and how it searches as a database. I had never heard of the term "Invisible Web" or "Deep Web" so it's also good to know that search engines will not always find content that is hidden deeply. deepdyve.com is a good tool for finding this type of content.

The advanced tutorials provided more sophisticated tools to searching the Internet. A good model is provided from 21cif.com/resources/difcore/index.html. This model follows this guide: What am I looking for? Where to find it. How will I get it? How good is the information? How will I ethically use the information? One important tool to understand in searching is turning your question that you are searching into a search query. You need to be able to identify the "big ideas" of what you are really searching for. Leave out the unnecessary words or "stock" words. Using the Advanced Search option in Google is a good tool for this. The Internet Search Challenge would be a great activity to use with students in teaching about searching the Internet and evaluating sites.

We need to teach our children to be empowered researchers. They spend so much time on the Internet without supervision so they need to be the critic.