WSI: Web Site Investigator

Dennis O'Connor is having students in his online course at the University of Wisconsin-Stout work through the activities in Web Site Investigator. We updated this package recently and it has proven to be an effective way for students to teach themselves effective Web evaluation skills.

It's well-known (from ours and other's research*) that students spend little time evaluating the information they retrieve from the Web.

For this reason, we created a detective game that incorporates information evaluation as the forensics activity. WSI: Web Site Investigator features four Web sites where students look for evidence that the information is credible or suspect:

• The Air Car (a car that runs on air)
• New Zealand Golf Cross (a golf game played with an elliptical ball)
• The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (an endangered cephalopod found in trees)
• Sorting Hat Personality Test (an online questionnaire that determines your Hogwarts house)

The WSI package provides a background article on each site and a link to the online site itself. Also included in the package are eight self-paced tutorials on investigative techniques that may be used to determine if the sites are bonafide or bogus:

• Author
• Publisher
• Date
• Bias
• Links To
• Links From
• Accuracy
• Evidence

In addition, there is an Evaluation Wizard for each of the four sites that investigators may use to file a case report to turn in if the package is used as part of a course. Dennis has his students complete and submit a Case Report on one of the sites selected by the student. For the Case Report, each student examines three aspects from the bulleted list above in order to back up a claim that the site is trustworthy or not. The deeper the investigation goes, the more interesting the discoveries--it's actually fun.  The objective is that students understand how investigative techniques may be used and start to question the veracity of EVERYTHING they find online. You can't tell if information can be trusted without investigation.

Try it out for yourself!

* The reader is directed to our new book Teaching Information Fluency for more information on student's lack of evaluation skills.

Embedded Evidence, External Evidence

Over the weekend I created two new tutorial resources for the Website Investigator series (WSI): Accuracy and Evidence. In addition to knowing who is the author and/or publisher and when it was written or published, finding embedded evidence and external evidence can be very important in verifying the credibility of the source and the content.

In the simplest terms, credibility depends on source and content. Information about the author and publisher helps to define the source--where did these ideas originate? Is the author recognized as an expert? Does this publisher submit works to careful review before posting them? Embedded and external evidence helps to define the content--how are words used (signs of objectivity or bias)? When was this written? Who links to it? What do experts say about the content? A questionable source may produce brilliant content and a trusted author may produce flawed content--so it's important to check both before accepting information at face value.

As educators know, the majority of students today tend to accept information at face value. Somehow, merely finding information feels sufficient. Investigating it is unimportant.

To encourage investigation, students need to be shown and practice a few basic techniques. These are not hard to learn and don't take much time. Compared to searching (which I now call speculative searching--when you don't know exactly what words to search with and where to look), investigative searching is much more precise: the keywords are clues embedded in the information and the places (databases) to search are well-defined.

Think of embedded evidence as clues in the text, the url and metadata. These clues can be used to investigate the accuracy of information and often lead to external sources that have already done an evaluation.

The new Accuracy tutorial focuses on three areas: Finding powerful clues embedded in a Web page, checking the evidence by doing a secondary search and triangulating, checking what three different sources have to say about the information.

The companion Evidence tutorial emphasizes using queries to find external evidence, checking whether pages that link to the information support it or contradict it and triangulating information sources (examples that are different from the Accuracy module).

These tutorials are geared for middle schoolers through adults. There's increasing demand for similar activities aimed at elementary grade students, and that's my next project.