How Online Research Can Make The Grade

"....just as the academic community has started to accept the inevitability of sites like Wikipedia, the Web is also about to foist what may be the biggest complexity it has encountered since the advent of the free-for-all encyclopedia. As the school year starts, the recent proliferation of question-and-answer sites--like the brainy Quora and the soon-to-be-everywhere Facebook Questions--may prove to be students' next last-ditch time-saver and teachers' next digital bogeyman." Read more on C/Net.

Helping Students Evaluate News, Online Information

Students can be inundated with information online, and should be taught how to determine fact from fiction when searching for news and information online. The News Literacy Project offers tips to help students evaluate what they read. Students should consider whether they are reading an opinion column, news article or blog post, think critically about what they are reading, recognize bias, use Wikipedia with caution and double-check information using reliable Web sites, such as FactCheck.org or Snopes.com. More from Edutopia online.

Students and Their Internet Search Strategies

My issue (Jan/Feb 2010) of "Multimedia & Internet@Schools" magazine arrived in today's mail. There is an excellent article entitled "What Kids Know (and don't know) About Technology." It is not yet on the publisher's web site, but you might look for it in the coming week or so. While doing a little digging, I came across an ed tech coordinator's blog complaining about students and their inability to search adequately. Embedded in this blog is a short video featuring a GOOGLE specialist on how to use their search engine. Lastly, Teacher Librarian has an appropriate article about all of this, including some strategies to help students in their searches.

Wikipedia to color-code untrustworthy text

From eSchoolNews.com: Starting this fall, you'll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia, Wired reports: An optional feature called "WikiTrust" will color-code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

Crap Detection 101

Love the title of Howard Rheingold's latest blog entry. An excerpt: "The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. Learning to be a critical consumer of Webinfo is not rocket science. It's not even algebra. Becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of web credibility testing is easier than learning the multiplication tables. The hard part, as always, is the exercise of flabby think-for-yourself muscles."