Evaluation Method: Authorship

Other than the personal sniff test, which can be tainted by subjectivity, savvy searchers have other means at their disposal to determine if news may be fake or not.

One of these methods involves investigating the AUTHOR of the work in question. Schools that subscribe to Information Fluency have access to WSI - Website investigator, five cases for students to test their evaluation skills. To assist students, a series of tutorials are provided. Today's free preview is the WSI Authorship Tutorial: Finding and Evaluating an Author.

For more information on an annual subscription, see the Benefits of Membership.

If your school is already using WSI, we'd love to hear how you integrate it with other instruction and what students are discovering.

The New Digital Divide

I've been thinking about this topic for some time and came across a statement today that sums it up nicely:

“The original conceptualization of the digital divide was that you had people who didn’t have access to computers or the Internet. Nowadays, it’s more of a divide between those who are skilled in locating the right type of information and those who struggle to understand how to search it effectively.”

Today's challenge: locate the author of those words.  Shouldn't take more than 10 seconds if you know what to do.

Vampire for President?

During the 2008 presidential election, Susie Flynn, a 10 year old, made a bid for the highest office in the land. Except she wasn't 10. And she wasn't a girl.

Now a vampire is making a bid for a 2012 campaign, supposedly as a republican candidate. He is known as John Sharkey, The Impaler. His campaign site is: http://www.theimpalerformngovernor.us/ You might want to take a look.  He is also interested in being governor of Minnesota.

The challenge: Who is John Sharkey? What evidence is there that the Republican party is actually taking him seriously? Is this campaign a front for some other cause (as was the case with Susie Flynn)? If so, what?

Sample Web 2.0 posts about him and his campaign. Look for clues about the nature of the campaign. Who is taking him seriously?