Teaching Media Literacy
Jane L. David
"Unlike reading assigned textbooks, reading online challenges students to make judgments about the reputability and validity of the information they see. Researchers who directed several hundred college students to three bogus Web sites about fictitious nutritional supplements found that half of the students lacked the skills to identify the trustworthiness of the information, yet most thought they had strong research skills" (Ivanitskaya, O'Boyle, & Casey, 2006).
Professor Ritcher recently had us test the validity of several fictitious websites. Naturally, the majority of students knew that the assignment was to critique the website as a whole and produce information that either proved the information's validity or proved the given information to be completely bogus. As I was reading this article written by Jane L. David, I thought it to be extremely interesting how a group of college students, who claimed well-developed research skills, were not able to detect the for sure signs of fraud and untrustworthiness. This also got me thinking that in all reality the majority of our class would have probably had the same outcome if we were placed in the same situation. If we had no knowledge that we were critiquing the validity of websites we too would have been convinced of lies presented on the screen. Not that we do not care about truthful information, I think it more or less boils down to the fact that we're overly trusting of the internet. It is either that or students today have just gotten seriously lazy with research.
http://www.library.illinois.edu/ugl/howdoi/webeval.html
The following link is one that helps students with the evaluation process of websites and web sources. The link gives each student or individual six simple steps to follow when judging the validity of certain sites. I found the steps to be extremely simple and reliable to use...this site is very user friendly.
University Library
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1408 W. Gregory Dr. | Urbana, IL 61801
217-333-2291
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