Evaluating Information

...the presence of inaccurate and biased information on the Internet is not our primary problem.
The information and points of view have not really changed, it is the tools that have changed.
David Warlick in Evaluating Internet-Based Information: A Goals-Based Approach

In the article Critical Evaluation in the Collaborative Era, Kathy Schrock asks How do we teach critical evaluation of information when we have no way to determine authority? The focus in this article is on the issues and difficulties that arise in determining the 'research worthiness' of information in a wiki world.

Articles and Checklists

Better Read That Again: Web Hoaxes and Misinformation

This article differentiates and discusses differenent kinds of misinformation: counterfeit sites, parodies and spoofs, ficticious, questionable, malicious, product sites and subject specific misinformation sites. It also offers a number of sites that track internet misinformation including Snopes.

BBC interview with Tara Brabazon - "Google is white bread for the mind" - article in Times Online. - both of these may be time sensitive and therefore at some point the links may be broken.

Google is “white bread for the mind”, and the internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information

Teacher Helpers: Critical Evaluation Information - a collection of articles and evaluation checklists available from Kathy Schrock

Popular MicroModules on Evaluation from the 21st Century Information Fluency Project: Author: Who is the Author? Publisher: Who published this Web site? Date: How Recently Was the Page Published or Updated? Bias: Indicators of Bias Evidence: What is Evidence? Accuracy of information Links from: How reliable are pages that link from a Web site? Links to: How can pages that link to a Web site indicate its reliability?

Hints About Print
This is an interactive tool that takes students (grade 3 - 5) through a processing of determining if a non-fction book is the best resource for their research. Once students have viewed the online demo they can print-out a fillable PDF and evaluate their own non-fiction book.

Quality Information Checklist - uses imaginary examples, quizzes and puzzles to allow young people (grades 3 - 7) explore for themselves the concepts around information quality. Many of the examples are health related, but the concepts can be used with any subjects that require information skills.

Fact or Folly: Evaluating Online Information - from Media Awareness Network

Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask - uses critical thinking skills, a series of specific questions, and techniques to provide a strategy for determining if a website can be trusted.

Online Evaluation Tools

Digital Index Card - a web-based tool for collecting and evaluating Net information. It consists of six forms that ask questions of the researcher, all designed to collect content and to help the researcher make decisions about the appropriateness of the information. As student input pertinent information about the source they asked questions which relate back to their research goal e.g. What aspect(s) of the author's or publishing organization's background helps you accomplish your goal?

Evaluation Wizard from 21 Century Information Fluencey - as students enter their evaluation notes for author, publisher, objectivity, date, accurancy and evidence they are provided with prompts about what to look for within the web site they are evaluating.

A WebQuest about Evaluating Web Sites : from Joyce Valenza for grade 9 - 12 students (Note - last updated in 2001 - links may have to be updated)

Applying Reading Comprehension Strategies to the Evaluation Process

Critical Evaluation: Scary Research Findings Prompt New Internet Reading Strategies

Julie Coiro presents five activities associated with the online reading tasks that research suggests are particularly challenging for students who read to learn on the Internet. Each activity is accompanied with pertinent questions and relevant web sites.

• evaluating relevancy - reading search results
• evaluating reliability- investigating the author
  
• evaluating reliability - investigating the validity of the web site
• detecting bias - separating fact from opinion
  
• detecting bias - developing a healthy skeptism
  

A Think Aloud to Model Online Reading demonstrates how to use reading comprehension strategies to read, question and ultimately evaluate the relevance and validity of a web page. From: 21 Century Literacies

Researching a Web Page - using Treaty 6 students respond to a number of questions which focus their reading on each part of the Web page. (From - Elgin Wyatt, NBCHS)

From Alan November

Our students must understand the architecture of the internet to be able to effectively evaluate the information they find.

How to Read a Web Address - The first step in learning the grammar of the Internet is to read URLs closely.

WayBack Machine - Want to see the history of web site? Take a trip through time with the Wayback Machine.

How to Find the Publisher of a Website using EasyWhoIs

Beyond the Checklist - using contextual analysis to evaluate web pages

Student Web Page Evaluation - a blog post that describes a successful lesson in which the teacher asks the students to use the comparison method. This requires requires the researcher to compare different sources and different types of sources in order to select the most useful.

Diagram from U Arizona Information Literacy: Evaluating Web Resources

Organizing Information

 

 
Organizing information

• Utilize a variety of visual organizers
• Take notes using point form and paraphrasing
• Create an outline
• Tag and describe bookmarks using a social bookmarking tool

 

 

Taking Notes

Note Cards - examples
Taking Notes - using the notecard method

The following two links are from Debbie Abilock's NoodleTools - many ideas and links for teaching students to paraphrase, quote and summarize.

• Big Ideas of Note Making and Note Taking
• Note Making and Note Taking Links

Research Building Blocks: Notes, Quotes, and Fact Fragments (Grade 3 - 5)
The students learn the importance of finding the words in sentences and paragraphs that contain the facts they need for compiling their research. The students then move to putting those notes into their own words, avoiding plagiarism. Embedded in this lesson is an online activity where students can participate in the fact finding process.

Online Note-taking tools

ReadWriteThink Notetaker (Grade 3 - 5)
This hierarchical outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information for reading and writing activities. During or after reading, the Notetaker can be used to compile and organize reading notes, research, and related ideas. During the writing process, students can use the tool to organize their information and plan texts in the prewriting stage and to review and structure their ideas during writing and revision.

Ubernotes - This web-based application focuses on just one thing; helping you write and then find your notes. A review of this application can be found at School Library Journal.

Best4C - online diagram tool that allows you to create, edit and share charts

Google Notebook
Clip and collect information as you browse the web:

• Clip useful information.
  You can add clippings of text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window.
  
• Organize your notes.
  You can create multiple notebooks, divide them into sections, and drag-and-drop your notes to stay organized.
  
• Get access from anywhere.
  You can access your Google Notebooks from any computer by using your Google Accounts login.
  
• Publish your notebook.
  You can share your Google Notebook with the world by making it public.

NoteStar from 4Teachers
Designed specifically for students in grade 4 - 12 NoteStar is an Internet utility to assist in the preparation of research papers. Teachers and students can set up research projects with topics and sub-topics. Students may then take advantage of NoteStar's many features to collect and organize their notes and prepare their bibliography page.

The article Hitting the Books in McGill Reporter, Jan 2008 recommends the following two tools:

MyNoteIt
A note-taking tool for students that allows you to take notes directly in the web interface, or upload existing Word or OpenOffice documents, scanned images, handwritten notes and audio files into a searchable database. Also features an assignment calendar, a to-do list, a grade-tracker and add-ons for Facebook and cellphones.

Notecentric

An online note-taking application for Facebook. Its capabilities seem to be more limited than mynoteIT, but it has the advantage of operating through one of the best-known destinations on the web.

Creating the Outline

Using Outlines - this article discusses how to use outlines at the different states of the research including the working outline, the pre-writing outline and creating an outline to hand in.

Sythesizing Information: The Thesis

Thesis...
...point of view of the author
...a premise to be maintained or proved
...the purpose of the research
...the basic argument
...an intellectual proposition
...the theme of the whole piece
...A proposition supported by research

 

What is a Thesis? - from Joyce Valenza the attributes of a good thesis, some great examples and a collection of links to other resources about developing a thesis.

Thesis Builder and Online Outline

Using Thesis Statements - this article debunks several myths about thesis statements

What's the Fuss About the Thesis? - a student made video about how to construct a thesis.

Teaching the process of design (or making student video projects interesting) - in this blog post the author discusses the importance of a thesis, a central idea, around which all design decisions are made.

Once a thesis is decided on, a concept for the production is formed that expresses the thesis and every design decision made during the production serves the thesis. This gives directors (or designers, or actors) a basic structure on which to base their production. Used correctly, a thesis can be the most powerful tool in a designer’s arsenal.

Analysis: Using evidence to support the thesis

Once in place the author then needs to provide the necessary evidence and accompaning citations to support the thesis.

How to Use Evidence

Ethical Use of Information

Understanding Copyright

At what point do concerns about safety become a fence preventing our students from participating in an increasingly flat world? Putting the ‘social’ into social networks allows us to freely exchange information. But with the free exchange of information comes the responsibility of how we share it, and how we give credit to the author of that information.

Check out this video, “A Fair(y) Use Tale” and learn some history of copyright

In the school library and classroom, we are often faced with the copyright challenges of when it is acceptable to copy something and how much of an item [book, website, music etc] we can copy. Faced with declining budgets and little time, we are tempted to go ahead and make the copies. But with the advent of file sharing, downloading and RSS, we must acknowledge and teach the ethics of information gathering and sharing.

Background on Canadian Copyright Legislation

Copyright Matters (the orange little booklet you should all have in your school)
Internet Citizenship from Media Awareness Network - overview and a list of links with more information about copyright and plagiarism.
Canadian Copyright Information - a set of links from Manitoba Education

Copyright Confusion

The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy (pdf - 17 pages)

From the Executive Summary:

The fundamental goals of media literacy education—to cultivate critical thinking about media and its role in culture and society and to strengthen creative communication skills—are compromised by unnecessary copyright restrictions and lack of understanding about copyright law, as interviews with dozens of teachers and makers of media literacy curriculum materials showed.

The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality - David Pogue of the New York Times describes a discussion on copyright morality with college students:

Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I’d ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.

In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.”

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

“Who thinks that might be wrong?”

Two hands out of 500.

 Doug Johnson in his post, Paradox Land , makes some recommendations for changing the focus of how we teach about copyright and intelletual property because "The mindset that “if we don’t know for sure, don’t do it” does not fit the needs of either students or their teachers. Changes I am thinking about recommending include:

1. Changing the focus of copyright instruction from what is forbidden to what is permitted.
   
2. When there is doubt, err on the side of the user. (Are we being "hyper-compliant"?)
   
3. Ask the higher ethical questions when the law seems to make little sense. (Look where it got Socrates. Well, yeah, there was that hemlock bit...)
   
4. Teach copyright from the point of view of the producer, as well as the consumer. (Does having others using your work without authorization or remuneration change your perception of intellectual property issues?)

 

How to legally use images, music and videos can be found on the Copyright Friendly Images and Music Search Tools Page.