Whenever I think about evaluations sources on the web, I think about a student I worked with a few years ago in a science class. She was looking for information on the Internet about nitrous oxide and was having a very hard time finding information. She finally found a page of information about nitrous oxide. It had no apparent author, no references to other texts or sources and had a suspicious looking web address. Knowing the U of I's penchant for the /~ name of individual user directories I though that it might be a student produced page. Sure enough, when we hit the back button on the page it went back to a very scary looking college student home page (think: face painting). This person was not a reliable source and seemed to be using nitrous oxide for illegal activities. My student was very surprised by this. Even though her teacher had asked her to verify the accuracy of all her sources she wasn't willing to do that (more work). Often when students can;' easily find the reference information that they need to know, they give up. Teachers can't assume that all sites have an author, because some legit sites don't have a specified author. Kids know this is the case so they don't really have to verify. My student was very disappointed to have lost a source and tried to justify a way to continue using it.
A lesson idea...
So what am I going to do about evaluating web sites? One of the things I want to teach my journalism students is to think critically. We do some questioning activities at the beginning of the semester. I would like to create a one-day lesson where my students will evaluate news sources on the Internet. A brand new web site, http://www.assignmenteditor.com/mainpage.htm that features just about every on-line newspaper you could find. Using this site as a starting point, I will have my students find choose different papers and look at similar news events and how they are portrayed differently around the world. Ideally, I would do this when there is a single world-wide new event in most papers around the world. My students could look for conflicting facts, coverage of the event, and objectivity. This could open up some very interesting discussions.
A thought...
You would not make assumptions about text in the library that were next to each other in the card catalog or next to each other the he shelf. They obviously have something in common (general topic, alphabetically related title) but the ideas and authenticity of the ideas and facts have no correlation. On the web there is that assumption. The authority of the New York Times rubs off onto whatever site the Times links to.
The quality of plagiarized papers just isn't what
it used to be...
An interesting side note to our critical reading of the Internet. It used to be that if you were going to plagiarize a paper, you would find someone (or a service) who could write well to compose a paper for you. Plagiarism has never been easier with the Internet, but anyone can post a paper on plagiarism sites. What this adds up to is a lot of bad to mediocre papers posted by students who cheat. Kids go to these sites to get a good paper that may not bring in a decent grade for them! So teachers listen up: even if it is bad it could still be plagiarized! One of my students stole a computer disk from another student and turned in her paper. They both got C's. Wouldn't is be a better idea to steal a smart kid's paper?