{"id":4120,"date":"2014-10-27T16:12:33","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T20:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=4120"},"modified":"2014-10-27T16:40:09","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T20:40:09","slug":"detecting-crap-on-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2014\/10\/detecting-crap-on-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Detecting Crap on the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

For our course about the impacts of the internet<\/a>, we developed an exercise to get our students thinking critically about the credibility of things they find on the web. As a number of colleagues have expressed in interest in this, I thought I would post it here. Feel free to use it and adapt it!<\/p>\n

Near the beginning of the course, we set the students to read the chapter “Crap Detection 101: How to Find What You Need to Know, and How to Decide If It\u2019s True”<\/em> from Rheingold & Weeks’\u00a0book NetSmart<\/a>. During the tutorial, we get them working in small groups, and\u00a0give them several, carefully selected web pages to test their skills on. We pick webpages that we think are not too easy nor too hard, and use\u00a0a mix of credible and misleading ones. It’s a real eye-opener exercise for our students.<\/p>\n

To guide them in the activity, we give them the following list of tips (originally\u00a0distilled from the book by our TA, Matt King, who wrote\u00a0the first draft of the worksheet).<\/p>\n

Tactics for Detecting Crap on the Internet<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a checklist of tactics to use to help you judge the credibility of web pages. Different tactics will be useful for different web pages \u2013 use your judgment to decide which tactics to try first. If you find some of these don\u2019t apply, or don\u2019t seem to give you useful information, think about why that is.\u00a0Make notes about the credibility of each webpage you explored, and which tactics you used to determine its credibility.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Authorship\n