Thursday, October 4, 2001

tech.life@school | Joyce Kasman Valenza

The Web is full of inferior resources

Students must be taught how to evaluate sites for quality and be held accountable for choices.

From my vantage point, as an educator who examines several hundred research projects each year, the typical student is a poor information consumer. We have to expect inferior products when we don't encourage students to evaluate their resources or hold them accountable for quality. These days, it is especially important to be a good information consumer.

B.W. (before the Web), students had help selecting information. Publishers, book and journal editors, booksellers, and librarians carefully filtered their research fodder for reliability and quality. But, alas, the Web is a self-publishing medium. While it allows a truly democratic voice to all who care to contribute, noise and garbage are by-products of its glorious democracy.

Over the last few years, I have seen variations on the following disappointing themes:

• High school students citing Web projects written by fifth graders.
• Students relying on erroneous or skewed sources - for instance, Holocaust denial sites, and sites with clear commercial or political bias - without seeking balance.
• Students mistaking Web-based variations of Cliffs Notes for scholarly criticism for their honors English projects.
• Students ignoring what I call the premium channels - the subscription journal and reference databases available online - in favor of less-than-reliable Web sites that appear on the result list of their favorite search engines.
• Students ignoring reliable print sources - in-depth biographies and scholarly nonfiction - in favor of a two-page printout.

While we adults have a broad scope of knowledge that may allow us to recognize the name of a reputable organization, such as the American Cancer Society, or a prominent figure in the news or in a professional area, our students have a much narrower scope. They have little background for determining quality. In the unchecked landscape of the Web, all information is not created equal, and assessing accuracy, relevance, validity, bias and currency requires a good deal of judgment.

What to evaluate?

Students must evaluate their search tools.

The search box is not a magic bullet. The savvy student selects the right search box, evaluates his or her choice of search tools.

A colleague recently pointed out that he does not ask his plumber buddy for help with his will, and he doesn't ask his lawyer buddy for help with his clogged drain. Search tools have specialties, too. Students who know to start with a subject specialty search engine or a highly selective subject directory - such as Librarians Index to the Internet - eliminate the noise of the wider Web and make use of an expert's careful selection.

To a student, the result list is a puzzle. How do you choose among the millions of sites listed? How do you recognize quality from the sketchy clues presented? Strategic searching and search-tool selection might push some of the better hits to the top of the list, but choices still must be made.

We can model result-list evaluation with our students. Parents can do this informally as a student researches. In school, a teacher may project a sample list and encourage a class discussion about which hits to choose and which to discard. Consider laminating and cutting up sets of results. Have students at each table arrange them in "priority visit" order.

Students must evaluate the sites they plan to use.

If we are serious about encouraging scholarship, we must teach students that before selecting a site for inclusion in a bibliography, they must be able to establish its relevance, validity, authorship, timeliness and basic integrity. They ought to be able to defend any source they use in their bibliography. Students must be held accountable. If teachers do not carefully examine a student's list of sources, as well as his or her products, we lose critical opportunities for instruction and we should expect inferior work.

One strategy I have used successfully is the bibliography checkpoint, a conference with students to make sure their resources are solid before they move on to writing the big product. We have also required that students annotate their sources. This may take the form of a full paragraph formal annotation, or a simple note under a citation of why this author is credible.

My favorite activities for use with high school students were created by universities. The ICYouSee: T is for Thinking page, at http://www.ithaca.edu/library/Training/hott.html, pairs quality and less-than-quality Web sites for students to compare. Berkeley's Evaluating Web Pages: Experience Why It's Important, at www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html, guides students through an interactive assessment of sites on such subjects as Latin America, gun control and immigration.

To get the point across quickly, consider examining some meant-to-be-bad Web sites as a class. I like the slick-looking Clones R Us, at www.d-b.net/dti/, Ken Umbach's classic California's Velcro Crop Under Challenge, at http://homeinreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html, and the Jackalope Conspiracy http://www.sudftw.com/jackcon.htm.

This problem extends beyond the world of K-12 education.

Folks tell me that it's a "good enough/why bother world," that when people can get some information they won't go to the trouble to get the best information. It may be a quixotic quest, but I believe if educators and parents work together, and if we continue to value scholarship, we can teach students to use the Web critically, and we can prove those folks wrong.

For a more complete list of evaluation activities, bogus sites, and lessons I have developed for use with my own students, visit http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/inqlinks.html

Joyce Kasman Valenza is the librarian at Springfield High School in Erdenheim, Pa. Her column appears each week in tech.life.

Her e-mail address is joyce.valenza@phillynews.com.

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