Trust, But Verify
There were very few statements that Ronald Reagan made during his presidency with which I agreed. One of them was "Trust, but verify." Reagan famously used it when referring to negotiations with the Soviet Union, but it's appropriate in reference to validating information on the web as well. The knee-jerk reaction of my students (and most of the rest of us) when researching a subject is to go to Google or Yahoo and perform a search. We search, read, and believe.
The problem is that, just because something is on the web, doesn't make it true. So, how do we teach our students to trust, but verify? And what, exactly, does it mean to "verify"? Not only is the web full of truths and lies, but it also has a full range of opinions on just about any subject you can imagine. Is a moon-landing denial website merely one person's opinion, or an outright refutation of an accepted fact? That's the first problem; the viewpoint of the writer isn't necessarily the same as the reader. We need to teach students to be able to differentiate.
One difficulty with search engines such as Google and Yahoo is that they overwhelm you with information. Search "iPod" on Google, and you'll get more than 230 million hits. A lifetime of verification wouldn't be long enough to check out the veracity of that many websites. Unfortunately, search engines don't have a "truthiness" algorithm to help you decide which ones are valid, and the ranking doesn't necessarily put the accurate websites at the top of the list. That's the second problem that students face--too much information without an automated method of sorting it out.
Some websites present a different problem. They give the appearance of truth with no guarantee of certainty. The most frequently noted culprit is the online encyclopedia that everyone either loves or hates--Wikipedia. Unlike traditional encyclopedias such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica whose writers and editors are experts in their fields, anyone can contribute to or edit an article on Wikipedia. If you read something on Wikipedia that you believe is not correct, you can go in and edit it. Despite the obvious potential for abuse, Wikipedia works quite well. And it is an incredible resource for current information and trivia that never makes it to the more mainstream sources.
Want a history of Pokéman? Don't bother with the Britannica; you won't find it there. However, you can find everything you've ever wanted to know and more here on Wikipedia . If you're a Pokéman expert, feel free to add whatever else you know. Wikipedians seem devoted to keeping articles current. For example, within twelve hours of the rock group Van Halen's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on March 12, the Wikipedia article had been updated with the details. Printed material such as a traditional encyclopedia is disadvantaged by a much longer publishing cycle.
Critics of Wikipedia claim that, since anyone can edit an article (even your sixth grade students), then all articles are suspect. That's true in theory, but a recent study by the scientific journal Nature, comparing scientific articles in Wikipedia and the Britannica, found that each had about the same number of errors. There are high-profile exceptions, but generally, the self-correcting nature of Wikipedia's open-access approach seems to work.
The problem with using Wikipedia is not that it contains some inaccuracies--all newspapers publish corrections to their previous day's articles yet we keep reading them every day. The problem is in relying on Wikipedia, or any source, as the only source. This is another hard truth that we need to teach our students. We need to help them to become critical researchers and critical thinkers. Too often students submit research papers with only Wikipedia sources. The Boston Globe recently reported that the history department at Middlebury College has banned students from using Wikipedia as a source. Middlebury professor Neil Waters says, "Wikipedia is an ideal place to start research but an unacceptable way to end it." This should be true for everyone from college on down. Interestingly, some colleges assign students to write or edit articles for Wikipedia. Obviously then, there's a commitment by those institutions to using Wikipedia and making it better.
So how do we teach students to evaluate the accuracy of information on the web? My school's librarian and I recently did a project on library research with my grade six technology class. First, she presented information on evaluating websites using some of the excellent materials from CyberSmart! After a discussion in which she talked the class through the characteristics of reliable and unreliable websites, we had the students evaluate a site using a Site Evaluation Form. Not only did this help lead the students through a step-by-step evaluation procedure, it set the stage for a discussion on the difficulties of evaluating sites. After some analysis we concluded that there are telltale signs of an obviously unreliable site.
The difficulty is that even the most reliable sites don't always have the characteristics that one would expect. For example, although a sign of an untrustworthy site is a lack of an author, many reliable sites don't list an author either. In any case just having a name doesn't guarantee that there is a real person behind it. Again, the conclusion that you shouldn't rely on one site for your information became apparent. There's strength, and truth, in numbers.
After using the Site Evaluation Form we moved on to the second part of the lesson in which students evaluated one of several sites from a list that we gave them. These were all sites that had none of the obvious signs of unreliability. They were all bogus, but we didn't tell that to the students. They all meet most or all of the criteria of a valid site. Here's the list.
Each student had to review at least one site and write a commentary in his blog discussing the validity of the information. The essential question was, "How does one determine the reliability of a website?" Without prior knowledge, it isn't easy. Even a resident of Minnesota may not know that Mankota is a fictional town. The idea was to lead the students to the conclusion that the best practice is to verify information by cross-checking with other sources. These could be other websites, printed material, human beings, and common sense. Although none of these four categories is one-hundred percent reliable, in combination they are a useful means of verifying information. In the end, the lesson to the students was that determining veracity is as much an art as a science. It takes practice, but it's something that is a necessary skill of a good researcher. So, "trust, but verify" is as important in website evaluation as it is in Soviet negotiations.
Not one to give Reagan any more credit than he deserved, I verified that he was not the first to use the "trust, but verify" line. That honor goes to the American writer, Damon Runyon. I found it here in Wikipedia.
