A Fourth BAD APPLE Challenge

Just added, another BAD APPLE Challenge:

• Challenge 4: North Shore Whale Watching
  

 

Here's a trustworthy tourism site with a section on whales in Lake Superior.

All four challenges are available without a subscription. Try them out today!

https://21cif.com///tutorials

Do you have a page or site you'd like to nominate for this evaluation tutorial? We're going to add a fifth challenge soon. Let us know if you have one to recommend.

Two New BAD APPLE Challenges

 Two new BAD APPLE Challenges have just been added to our Website:

• Challenge 2: All About Explorers
• Challenge 3: CBS News Hoax Sites

 

Both provide a mixture of GOOD and BAD APPLES to sort out. Can the sites be trusted? How can you know?

For a limited time, both Challenges are available without a site subscription. Try them out today!

https://21cif.com///tutorials/evaluation/badapple/

Bad Apples

 

Introducing the (re)release of Bad Apples, a series of do-it-yourself evaluation tutorials.

With the demise of Adobe Flash, a lot of interactive games and tutorials on the 21st Century Information Fluency site were forced into early retirement. Over time, many of these resources were rewritten so they work on current Internet browsers. 

We're pleased to announce the return of BAD APPLES, a series of challenges to strengthen investigative searching.

Presently, one challenge is available and it doesn't require an annual membership.  Challenge #1 features New Zealand Golf Cross, a site that's been around since 1998. To play, individuals research six apples (elements that determine credibility):

1. Authorship
2. Publisher
3. Freshness
4. Bias
5. Backlinks
6. Fact checking

A player then drags each apple to either the GOOD APPLE or BAD APPLE basket, depending on their assessment. One point is earned for each correct assessment. A comprehensive analysis of the site provides insights into what makes the site trustworthy or not as well as these strategies for conducting an effective investigation:

1. How to find valuable information on a site
2. How to determine site ownership
3. How to determine the 'last modified' date
4. How to detect types of bias
5. How to find external reviews of site content
6. How to fact check and where to look, including Google Scholar 

Once learned, these skills apply to all Internet content.

Ready to play?  Start Here: https://21cif.com/tutorials/evaluation/badapple/

Watch for more Challenges to come!

Evaluation Tutorials

For a limited time, try our Evaluation Challenges without a subscription!

Evaluation Challenges focus on three key aspects of evaluating digital content:

1. Identity--who is the author or publisher?
2. Freshness--how recent is the information?
3. Accuracy--to what extent are the 'facts' supported by evidence?

Each of the 10 tutorials in this module is interactive, giving feedback to user responses, and hints as needed.

If encouraging students to evaluate what they read online is important to you, assign these as homework or work through them in class, one or two a day.

https://21cif.com///tutorials/challenge/evaluate/

Information Fluency in a Nutshell

Most sites that provide resources to help individuals improve their ability to locate, evaluate and use information from online sources describe those competencies as "information literacy." A few, like 21cif.com prefer the term "information fluency."

What is information fluency in a nutshell?

 Briefly stated, we believe fluency depends on knowing how to:

ask searchable questions

create optimal queries

choose an appropriate Database for searching

query unfamiliar Databases

browse unfamiliar Webpages and Databases

interpret a URL

truncate a URL

skim and scan

use the Find Command

locate information about an author, a publisher, date of publication and secondary references

fact check

detect bias

read to evaluate the relevance and credibility of information sources and content

format a citation

The resources on our site all address these competencies. Here's a sampling:

Asking searchable questions: Keyword Challenges

Creating Optimal queries: Search Challenges

Browsing: Browsing Challenges

Locate the author: Author Tutorials

Locate the date: Date Detective

And many more... For complete access to all materials, consider an affordable annual membership. Membership has its benefits!

Finding an (elusive) Author's name

 

One of the most popular (visited) pages on 21cif.com is our collection of Citation Wizards.

Each wizard (MLA, APA, Harvard, etc.) indicates information that is needed for a proper citation. One of these is the author's name. It is hardly any problem identifying an author's name in conventionally published sources. Self-published Internet sources are different. An author isn't required to leave his or her name; some prefer to leave just a first name or pseudonym. 

A 12-part tutorial helps students (and teachers) with tools and strategies for finding elusive author's names. No subscription is required. 

This tutorial package is paired with MicroModule: Author as a companion exercise.

Try it out! How many challenges can you complete?

Minecraft Challenge

Play the Minecraft Challenge

Microsoft acquired Minecraft in 2014 for $2.5 billion. That's a lot of money to pay for a video game.

From 2014 through 2020, how much revenue did Microsoft earn with Minecraft? 

This search challenge exercises "know what you are looking for." The challenge is also timed--see if you can answer the question correctly in under 3 minutes.

https://21cif.com/tutorials/challenge/search/minecraft.html