Gullible's Travels

Our students love the net, which is OK. The problem is, they also trust it, which is not. Teachers tell horror stories about students who actually believed satirical articles from The Onion and used them as evidence in term papers. In a survey of 1,693 students, Susan Gibson (associate professor, Dept. of Elementary Education, Univ. of Alberta) and Canadian educator Joanne Tranter found that 22 percent believed that 80–100 percent of what they found on the net was truthful.

And though a majority of the students maintained that only 50–70 percent of what was on the Internet was true, they lacked sufficient strategies for deciding what was true and what wasn't. In a national survey about news sources for Editor and Publisher (5/15/00), 76 percent of 550 regular Internet users said they could learn everything they needed to know from the net; 51 percent said the Internet had the most accurate information.

Oh, dear.

It is no longer enough to teach students research skills. Now librarians and teachers must train students in the skills of discernment when it comes to the Internet. This is doubly difficult because not only are students prone to believe what they find there, but they also believe they know far more about the net than any adult. The best way to get students to assume a healthy skepticism of the Internet is by playing to their inherent motivations.

One is their fear of being suckers. That's why the most effective single ad against teen smoking ever broadcast was the one that showed middle-aged tobacco executives gloating about what easy marks kids were—all they had to do to make them lifelong customers was to persuade them that smoking was cool.

An effective ploy is to tell students that we want to arm them with a personal "crap" detector. We want to help them develop a set of questions to ask any site in order to decide whether it is trying to con them and whether its information is reliable or not.

The first question they can ask about any web resource is, "Why are they giving this away for free?" Most naïve users don't grasp that even though the site is free for them, it is not free for the people who created and maintain it; in fact, it may cost enormous amounts of money. How do the site owners plan to recoup their costs? What are they selling?

The real product may well be the user. Are site owners selling our attention to advertisers? If a health site runs ads for drug companies, does that affect what the site says about preferred treatment for medical conditions? Does the site provide a written advertising policy you can click on and read? If we register for free products or information, will our personal data be sold to advertisers? Is there a written privacy policy we can click on?

Alternately, the site owners may not be trying to sell us a product but instead their particular interpretation of the world. Is the information one-sided? Does the site imply that those who think differently are deliberately lying? Does it only offer its own interpretation of what opponents say, or does it let you decide for yourself by linking to the other side and letting you read the opposition's own words in complete context? Does it use the language of reasoned discussion or of vituperation? Multiple exclamation points are a bad sign.

Since students are often intrigued by conspiracy theories, you might have them critique a wonderfully paranoid site, such as "US Government Lies: TWA Flight 800—Was It Friendly Fire?" (webusers.anet-stl.com/%7Ecivil/govliestwaflight800.html ).

That's almost too easy, though: the frantic hostility of its language is so over-the-top that the site discredits itself. A far more insidious example of extreme spin is the Institute for Historical Review. This organization posts ads in campus newspapers arguing that its version of the Holocaust has unfairly been ignored or deliberately squelched by an academic establishment enthralled by political correctness. Since Americans are taught that it's only fair to hear both sides of any issue, this is an extremely effective tactic.

This site also uses all the trappings of academic argument, the very things librarians look for as a sign of respectability: it has a scholarly journal, cites bibliographic references, analyzes statistics. It even links to opposing sites like the US Holocaust Museum, with a snide remark that it's not holding its breath until those sites link back.

The question for students then is, "Are you being manipulated?" Because the site is so skillful, answering this requires some more sophisticated strategies. One strategy is examining what other knowledgeable people think about the site.

Since the site proudly proclaims that it is arguing revisionist ideas, it is trying to make a virtue of its opposition by scholarly opinion. That doesn't necessarily make an idea wrong: Galileo was going against accepted opinion, too. But sites that defy accepted wisdom have a higher burden of proof. Scholarly opinion, after all, has already met a high standard of proof. It is based not on a few pieces of evidence, not on a few flaws in an existing theory, but on a compelling weight of evidence, gathered over time by many different scholars.

Link-checking is one of the techniques students can use to find out how well thought of a site is. Most search engines allow you to type link: URL (e.g., link: www.ihr.org) to find out what other sites link to the one you're examining. When major scholarly organizations do not link to it, but white nationalist groups and sites about hate groups do, that's a good sign this site is not to be trusted.

Another useful site for students to look at is Spinsanity: Countering Rhetoric with Reason, which examines news stories on both sides of the political spectrum for misrepresentation and spin. It links to the original sources and demonstrates how words are misquoted, lifted out of context, and twisted to make political points. It's a site guaranteed to make students more skeptical about the news.

Another way to instill solid evaluation skills in students is to tell them you're willing to trust them with your institution's reputation. Let them create web pages that will run on the school's site or the library's site, and tell them that you're relying on them to get it right. Perhaps they could generate web pages for specific courses or topics, or for a ThinkQuest project. They could even create a page teaching other students how to evaluate Internet resources.

Make it a class project, where students compete against each other to get their favorite web sites included on the page, and guidelines for evaluating resources would become the rules by which the game is played.

Of course the first questions aren't about web sites or sources at all: they're about what kinds of information are needed and what good information for this purpose looks like. Do they need laws? Primary documents? Maps? Statistics? News reports? Research reports? Anecdotal evidence? Polls? Portals? Position papers for and against? Let students develop an organizational framework for the page first, to help them look for specific types of information.

Once each student has come up with a set of sites, it's time to display them in class and let everyone ask questions about those sites. One of the questions should be: How do they know that?

If your students are ready to deal with a contemporary tragedy, ask them to find out how many people died at the World Trade Center. This is not an easy search on which to base a definitive answer, since numbers range from 2950 to 6000, and there are new figures every week. This exercise forces students to consider how the government and the media calculate statistics. Students won't find answers with standard search engines, because these numbers are only going to be found in news stories. They'll need to use news search engines like Pandia Newsfinder or Total News, or click on the News subsections of standard search engines.

Your students will need to figure out whose numbers to trust. Who is best positioned to gather reliable data? Probably officials of the City of New York, since they are responsible for issuing death certificates. Students will need to make distinctions: Do the numbers include people in the two planes that crashed into the towers? They'll also need to inquire about the evidence to back up the tallies they receive. Initial reports were based on lists of missing people, but some of those names were duplicates, and some of those people were found and removed from the lists. Finally, your students will need to pay close attention to when stories were posted.

Another interesting "How do they know that?" question for students to investigate would be to review public opinion about abortion, or gun control, or almost any other controversial topic, because, as we know, answers vary in accordance with who is asked and how the questions are phrased. A useful site to send them to would be The Polling Report, which gathers the results of various polls on a topic. When polls have been repeated, Polling Report compares the changes in opinion over time. For each poll, it shows the sample, the margin of error, and the exact questions to which respondents replied.

You also want students to be more discerning, exercising critical thinking skills. No matter what type of information they confront, regardless of its origin, they should ask the question, "Does that make sense in terms of what I already know?" For instance, if a web site or news story claims that 16,000 American girls die of anorexia every year, students should say to themselves, "Um, wait a minute, just how many American girls die of any cause in a given year?" That should send them to sources like Statistical Abstract or to the University of Michigan's Statistical Resources on the Web to verify.

As students begin arguing about the veracity of content on web sites, it will become clear to them that they need guidelines for analyzing and thinking about conflicting information.

Of course, it's more difficult for us to evaluate information when we don't know much about the topic in the first place. That's why one project that could help students improve their search and evaluation skills is to have them construct webliographies or web pages about subjects on which they're passionate. It doesn't have to be an important topic: they can learn about the research process by looking for reliable information on Anthrax the band as well as anthrax the disease. Whatever the topic, they have to ask the same questions: What kinds of information do I need for this purpose? Who is the source? Why should I trust them? How do they know that? "Does that make sense in terms of what I already know?"

Suppose they want to deal with something you think is arrant nonsense—Nostradamus, for instance, or how deodorants cause breast cancer. Those are perfectly fine topics, as long as you insist that students consider alternative explanations and visit sites like CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), the Urban Legends page, or the CDC's Health-Related Hoaxes page.

When students have a deep personal interest, they'll be willing to try searching on different search engines, where they can compare search results and learn which search engines tend to give results they trust. Students may use search engines, but that doesn't mean they understand how little overlap there is between them, or how many sites each search engine is sifting through, or how frequently search engine spiders update their indexes.

A topic that genuinely engages their interest also gives librarians a good chance to show students topical search engines, directories, and reference resources on their topic. A study in Multimedia Schools found that though 73 percent of the students surveyed used search engines, only eight percent used subject guides, and just seven percent used online databases.

One good place to start searching for Anthrax the band, for instance, is the Universal Band List, which offers a band profile, links to the band's official site, other major pages, CDs, bulletin boards, tour dates, reviews, related artists, and more. For magazine articles, students could, and should, go to your own full-text databases, but they could also use FindArticles to search for magazine articles posted on the net.

When you show them such resources, they'll ask how they can find such specialized search engines and directories. That's when you can show them things like Librarians Index to the Internet or SearchIQ, which link in topical portals and search engines on many subjects.

Does all this sound like jujitsu, using our students' strengths and weaknesses to trick them into learning? So be it. Students desperately need that "crap detector," and they'll learn it better when they want and need it. And if they acquire a new respect for librarians' Internet smarts in the process, all the better.