Finding and Fact-checking Information

Here is the third and final free preview in this series of WSI (Website Investigator) tutorials. The Fact Checking tutorial is a useful how-to for finding embedded info to evaluate.

Much has been said about information in a post-truth age. To some extent, truth is what you want to believe. However, there may be solid reasons to back up that belief, or none at all. When the information has value to pass along, it's a good idea to make sure the facts about it are consistent. Otherwise you risk looking like a fool, which unfortunately still has a tendency to mar one's reputation.

Consider an annual subscription to the entire Information Fluency site. All your students can access the WSI cases plus many more helpful resources for one calendar year. More info.

Evaluating the Publisher Preview

Here's a free preview of the Evaluate the Publisher tutorial that is part of the WSI (Website Investigator) package.

If you can't determine who the author is, consider the publisher. They own the site and this can tell you something about the contents: whether they are endorsed or not by a reputable publisher.

An annual subscription gives you and your students access to all Information Fluency resources for one calendar year. More info.

https://21cif.com/wsi/training/publisher.html

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.

Google Feud and Autocompletion

When you search using Google, you can't help but notice that Google autocompletes your queries. For example, if you type DRAGON FRUIT and then click in the search box, you'll see suggested queries like these:

• dragon fruit how to eat
• dragon fruit tree
• dragon fruit side effects 
• dragon fruit origin
• dragon fruit recipes
• dragon fruit calories
• dragon fruit taste
• red dragon fruit

Sometimes these guide your search, cluing you into things about dragon fruit you weren't aware of or the right words to use. Supposedly, the results are due to the popularity of terms used when searching for dragon fruit. For more information read this article.

This feature has been around a long time and Google wasn't the first to use it.

There's even a game that uses autocompleted queries: Google Feud

The game is instructive and aligns nicely with an Information Fluency observation: the "One in Five Rule." 

When creating queries your goal is to find a combination of keywords that are an exact match for the wording in the documents you seek. Different authors use different words to describe the same thing. There isn't strong evidence for the 1:5 ratio, but there are, on average, 13 synonyms per word, (see InfoWorld Dec 15, 1986). Considering that Web pages employ a limited range of language, it seems reasonable one's chances of searching for exactly the same keyword as a Web page author may be closer to 1 in 5. If an author uses a highly technical term, the ratio increases and you may never match it. In that case you have to search using contextual clues. The 1 in 5 "rule of thumb" means you should expect to revise your query more than once before matching keywords with an author. [Source]

Play Google Feud. How often do you match with any of the suggested queries?  There are four categories: CULTURE, PEOPLE, NAMES, QUESTIONS. I did poorly, matching the suggested keywords 7 times in 31 tries across the different categories. Interestingly, that's not much better than 1:5.

This experience opens a searcher's eyes to the possibilities that there are other words to use in queries than one person can think of. Finding the most relevant results depends on keywords another person has used. How you find those is a combination of trial and error, trying to think like the author whose words you are looking for and searching snippet results for clues to related words.

Personal Filters

On the 21st Century Information Fluency page last month, I posted this question:

What do you do to determine if news is fake? Share a tip.

The responses were all sound:

• (be wary of a site that) Doesn't provide reliable sources for the information or credentials of the author; if its intent is to elicit strong emotion.
• Consider/evaluate source and compare.
• Find multiple sources and compare.
• Use common sense and previous knowledge and experience. If it seems very strange check, double check snd triple check before accepting!
• Consult fact checking sites like Snopes or Fact-check.org
• Check to see who owns the site.

The tips fall into two types: evaluation methods and monitoring one's reaction to the news. Because it's internalized, the personal sniff test is the fast alternative and may suffer from subjectivity.

One of the problems in getting people of any age to fact check and source check is that it is time consuming. It requires secondary or investigative searching to research other sources of information in order to establish consistency and trust. Unless the stakes are high (risk is involved), I tend not to do it.

That leaves personal filters, which may seem pretty reliable depending on one's experience. Of course the younger you are, the less personal knowledge you have to rely on. Trusting what others say starts early, unless you were raised by wolves or the fear of them.

So let's say we assemble five individuals at random and expose them to some information. Are their reactions, informed by their personal filters, all going to be the same?  You can imagine the possibilities: one sees a conspiracy theory, one can take it or leave it, another becomes agitated, another is mollified and the last person has no memory of what they just read. Who's right? Everyone is, in their own eyes.

Personal filters can go dangerously awry, which is why it could be in the best interest of all to have a conversation or at least listen in to such conversations. One-sided truth seems to be a thing nowadays. 

Faked news is someone's one-sided truth. We might all benefit by sharing and listening before putting too much faith in our personal filters. When that's not possible, there is always fact and source checking.

Do You Skim?

Most of us skim to get the basic meaning without reading every word. This may work well when trying to spot keywords in articles or Web pages, but when skimming replaces reading the consequences can be unexpected.

• If I skim the news, I may know a detail or two but not understand the context or relationships on which events hinge.
• If I skim my latest Bill Bryson travel book, I will know a few things about a few places, but I may miss out on his experience of the journey.
• If I skim my wife's emails to me, I am bound to miss something that I will need to know. This happens frequently.

If I do this all the time, my ability to read deeply may be altered. At least this is the message in a new article by Marianne Wolf entitled, Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound. Understanding the complexities of prose or legal documents or other professionally authored works cannot be accomplished by skimming. It takes a slower read and can take some effort.

I am happy to see my granddaughter curl up for extended periods of time with Harry Potter books.  Maybe she's skimming, but I think she's enjoying the experience too much for that to be the case.

We teach skimming to speed up the keyword recognition process. But when it comes to evaluation, a slower read is necessary--otherwise, how can you detect bias or factual inconsistencies? Skimming is perfect for consumers of fake news: don't read too much and don't think too hard about what you read.

I encourage you to read the full article.  I think I'll spend more time seeing how catty Bill Bryson can be.

Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.

Keyword Targets

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, here's a glimpse inside the Fall 2018 Full Circle Resource Kit. As an instructional and assessment technique, create a wall poster of an archery target, or just buy one. Use sticky notes for each word in a student's query. Some words are bulls eyes: Proper Nouns and numbers. Others land on the target, coming close: nouns. The rest are likely to miss altogether, unless they are accompanied by a noun or number: verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, articles, conjunctions, prepositions and exclamation.

A graphic way to make this point is to place sticky notes on the target. It can also be used to provide feedback to students on the effectiveness of their queries.  For example, in the query, Who is the Latina Bronx Tarzan.... The first three keywords miss the target. The proper nouns, when used together, pinpoint the desired information, as shown below:

When one of the effective keywords is removed, however, the two remaining miss the information, coming close.

Next time your students try using complete sentences to search, the target exercise can get the point across that more words is less effective.

Access all the Kit resources with an annual school subscription for $249 (any number of students and staff can enroll for the same price).