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Gold or garbage: Mining the Internet
Diane Tinucci discusses the importance of
information literacy in education. She outlines her methods of teaching students how
to separate the worthwhile Web sites from the worthless Web sites when conducting research.
By Diane Tinucci
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 efreshingly,
the presidential candidates agree on one thing, "that no child [be] left behind
as we enter the new age of technology" (Bush 126). Vice-president Gore would
connect every school and library to the Internet in the next four years and
"invest in training teachers to use that technology to help students learn" (Gore
127). Governor Bush, too, sees beginning a fund "to help schools use technology
to improve student results and to train teachers in the best and most effective
uses of technology in education" (Bush 126). Both men see the power of technology
and the Internet to effectively and engagingly effect learning but are respectful
of the training needed to harness that power. Many teachers are already
grappling with harnessing issues, not the least of them being how to separate the
worthwhile from the worthless in mining the Internet for credible, reliable
information. I believe that helping ourselves and our students learn to
discriminate between the "gold" and the "garbage" on the Net is one of the most
important skills we can impart.
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"I believe that helping ourselves and our students learn to discriminate between
the "gold" and the "garbage" on the Net is one of the most important skills we
can impart."
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 ertainly, we need to acquire
that skill before sharing. Many of our colleagues are touting the importance of
information literacy in education. Didn't Alvin Toffler hint of this need first
in Future Shock when he predicted that the Information Age would demand a new
type of learning? Didn't he feel education should turn from its focus of
information memorization to information acquisition, manipulation, and
utilization? Toffler, twenty-five years later, was right; our students need to
"memorize" how to work with information. Such information literacy has four
components:
- The ability to recognize the need for information.
- The skill to locate the needed information.
- The skill to discern relative quality in the information located.
- The ability to create relevant, worthwhile applications of the information
deemed high quality.
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 e English
teachers, math teachers, foreign language teachers, and fine arts teachers must
turn from teaching the "fill in the blank" mentality to the new "create the
blank" goal. As all these information literacy skills are essential, I have
helped my students and colleagues focus on the third skill, the ability to apply
and interpret Web evaluation criteria to Web sites they locate.
Before I continue, I must describe my unique
position. My visionary principal, Dr. Dan Edwards, seeing the integral
relationship between technology and education (ahead of our presidential
hopefuls) has created two unusual teaching responsibilities at Lafayette High
School. I teach Language Arts (AP Literature and Honors Freshmen) for half the
day, and the other half of the day, I help teachers implement technology in their
curricula. Another teacher teaches math half time and partners with me in
helping more teachers see technology as a significant educational tool rather
than a Friday "play day" in the computer lab. Our principal charges us to
perform three broad goals:
- To help teachers implement technology in many ways including creating technology-based lessons, creating hotlinks resources pages, teaching technology-based lessons, securing and reviewing software, etc.
- To save teachers time in integrating technology and education in many of ways listed above.
- To demystify technology in providing formal and informal technology in a variety of software packages and uses of the Internet.
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" ... as I saw the Hey, I Really
Groove on Bill Shakespeare site sharing bibliography space with the MIT
Shakespeare Web, I knew I had to give my students and my colleagues' students new
awareness.
"
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 his amazing educator
understands the power of the Internet and the demands of a teacher's day. He has
secured the services of one "science techno-mind" and one "humanities
techno-mind" to support other teachers in mastering use of one of the most
effective educational delivery tools available.
I am the humanities arm. Early on, in the midst of
helping my colleagues create a
Web Quest on resume
creation, I came to understand how important it was to present information on Web
site evaluation to the 2000 students at Lafayette High School, who, at one time
or another, were asked to complete a research project. These students, more
technologically savvy than their teachers, but not the wizards that their middle
school siblings are, were still semi-dazzled by Internet searches yielding
bushels of "hits." Merrily and indiscriminately, they would copy down lists of
URLs to turn in as their projects' source lists. If it came from a computer, it
had to be straight from God, they thought. Yet, as I saw the Hey, I Really
Groove on Bill Shakespeare site sharing bibliography space with the MIT
Shakespeare Web, I knew I had to give my students and my colleagues' students new
awareness.
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 n
intelligent and substantive presentation at the October, 2000, Missouri
Educational Technology conference again affirmed my belief. Mr. Lloyd Pentlin,
Media Specialist at Lee's Summit North High School, in Lee's Summit, Missouri,
discussed research using the Internet, and said that the "biggest challenge is
validity" of the information located on the Web (Pentlin). He described reasons
for students' lack of good judgment in picking and choosing sites on which to
base research projects. They included lack of time, lack of understanding of
the difference between print and Internet publishing, and lack of understanding
of the need to screen sites (Pentlin). He went on to describe ways to raise
student awareness of site worthiness and reaffirmed my efforts to get the message
out to the masses, at least at Lafayette.
(As a side note, the second step in information
literacy, possessing efficient and effective search skills also demands
attention. I suggest a quality exercise found on Bernie Dodge's Web Quest Web
site, Seven Steps to Better Searching
. The exercise can be found under
Resources.)
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 began my campaign last
year, helped first by support materials published by the History Day project. An
enlightening article, "Evaluating Internet Research Sources" gave me rationale
for embarking on Web evaluation education and practical suggestions for doing so.
It presented a CARS Checklist, which I have since seen mentioned in several
sources, but, basically, this checklist presents four simple criteria for
evaluating the worth of Web sites. The acronym translates to:
- C = credibility. Is the article trustworthy and authored by an expert?
- A = accuracy. Is the article up-to-date, factual, and comprehensive?
- R = reasonableness. Is the article fair and objective?
- S = support. research and example substantiate what is said?
(Harris 23)
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first
decided to create a lesson where I would enter classrooms and teach this
checklist. I preceded it with discussion of the nature of "truth." No, this
wasn't a lofty philosophy discussion but rather a brief consideration of what it
meant for something to be "true" or "false." This discussion proved enjoyable
for the kids, as they examined a concept they thought they understood. We
briefly discussed that truth might be relative and that the relativity depended
on certain factors. I asked them to consider under what conditions the
statement, "Gee, your hair really looks great today," might by more true or more
false. (We agreed you could trust Mom but maybe not the girl vying for your
boyfriend's attention!) We discussed other statements, like "I will make sure
Social Security will be funded when you reach Social Security age," and "Women
who smoke are independent." We talked primarily about issues of source; could
you trust the speaker? And, to what degree could you trust the speaker? We also
talked about the difficulty in determining absolute truth, and that the best one
could hope for was to trust statements closer to the truth on a "true-false"
continuum. This valuable discussion had implications beyond Web site evaluation.
It struck me then, as it does now, that lessons learned in this Web evaluation
warm up lesson applied to media literacy and especially, in this election year,
political information literacy. (We literature teachers can make a quick hop to
narrative reliability in literature, too!)
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"Students found it
new information that .org mean organization, .gov, the government, .mil, the
military, and .edu, a college."
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 y discussion moved to the
issue of file extensions: how, if a file was a .doc, one knew it was a Word
document and how a .ppt was a Power Point and a .gif a picture. We went from
there to Internet "extensions," the "dot coms" and otherwise. Students found it
new information that .org mean organization, .gov, the government, .mil, the
military, and .edu, a college. We discussed the implications of those extensions
as well as the "dot coms," agreeing that commercial concerns could not be
dismissed as always belonging to the dark side. The students were beginning to
understand the complexity of discovering the "truth."
I then went on to discuss the CARS checklist,
uncomfortable that this, the most important part of the lesson, was delivered in
lecture. After the presentation, we looked at some sites I had presearched and
discussed their relative merits according to the CARS list. This lesson
presented an awareness of the issue, at least, and when teachers reinforced it
through their particular research assignments, it began to be internalized. I
helped one senior composition teacher presearch Web sites for a final exam item
asking students to compare and contrast the relative merits of two sites on the
same subject. I created a related lesson for a colleague, which can be found at
Missouri's SuccessLink Web site. Click
"contributor," my district "Rockwood," my name and select the "Frank Lloyd Wright
on the Web" lesson. It provides instructions and the hotlinks.
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y colleagues
began to appreciate the value of teaching Web evaluation in their classes, and,
soon, I was inundated with more requests to deliver the lesson than I had time.
In response to that, I created a Power Point presentation offering the high
points of my class Web evaluation lesson, so teachers could present the material
themselves. The teachers, who embraced the opportunity, appreciated this
approach, but I was haunted that the material was too important to lecture. Web
evaluation skills needed to be taught more interactively to be internalized.
So, last May, I developed a quasi Web Quest. I say
"quasi," because I developed it as a summer responsibility for freshman entering
an advanced research/language arts class. I wanted them to work with some ideas
before they reached me, so I could not put them in groups. Instead, I
presearched a list of sites dealing with Web site evaluation. (And that opened up
a whole new discussion avenue: "Could one trust all Internet sites dealing with
trusting Internet sites?") I then set the students to the task of developing a
Web evaluation checklist that the whole school could use based on the Internet
research they would do involving the sites I had provided. (The actual lesson can
be found at Missouri's SuccessLink Web site. Click "contributor," my district "Rockwood," my name and select the " Evaluation"
lesson. It provides instructions and the hotlinks.) Well, this was a raging
success. Students created and displayed checklists while practicing speech
skills explaining rationale and use. The students saw that although the form of
each sheet was quite different, the essential issues remained constant. They
didn't know it, but the criteria each developed to determine whether a certain
site was worthy of respect were variations of that trusty CARS checklist.
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e had wonderful discussions
that related to that task. Issues of what make a checklist convenient and usable
surfaced along with the even more important, "When does one know one is done
researching a certain topic?" You see, the sites on Web evaluation I had
searched for the kids contained a lot of redundant information. As they saw
that, they wondered what one does with duplicate information - use it to confirm
earlier findings, ignore it, use it to signal the end of research? Certainly,
many information literacy issues surfaced in working to assure that these
freshmen would not merrily and indiscriminately pull sites off the Web on which
to base a project. One of my strongest students exclaimed, "I never thought
about this before. I had printed five Web sites to use in my project, but I now
see that two of them might not be worth using." Perhaps immersing the kids in
Web evaluation issues meant a few of them were beginning to appreciate the
significant issues.
Wanting to tailor this lesson for colleagues, I
modified it into a more traditional Web Quest where I grouped the glut of
presearched sites into four sets for exploration by teams. These teams were
charged to create lists of the four or five most significant issues in evaluating
the quality of Web site information and highlight, in an oral presentation, not
only the need for Web evaluation strategies, but the two most important
evaluation criteria. The hotlinks for this site can be found at:
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/listwebsiteje.html.
Other teachers have asked for this resource site. Lafayette High School may be on its way to
information literacy.
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 ust last
Thursday, though, my honors freshman were showing me some "Ask Me" sites where
one could post a question and have an expert answer. These freshman, involved in
significant research, seem excited by this new opportunity. I was too, until I
popped in on two of these freshman girls working after school in our computer
lab. They were posing as experts, answering several "Ask Me" queries. Needless
to say, this was a mite discouraging after they had so thoughtfully considered
Web evaluation. I guess I will need to develop an additional lesson on being a
principled producer of information along with being an intelligent consumer!
I'll need to dust off those mining helmets as the newest Web evaluation issue
demands attention. Back to the pick and ax to devise the lesson, which teaches
that those desiring "gold" should not themselves, dispense "garbage!"
View Works Cited
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