During a recent visit to Wisconsin Dells, it occurred to me that a well-designed website can make any little flea-bag motel look like the Ritz. Creative writing and photography can make a tiny little inn with an algae-laden inflatable pool look like the waterpark capital of the world. Here's a tip - if the place advertises a poolside room for $39.99 per night, it ain't the Kalahari.
Some websites that appear to be totally legit can be completely phony. Others are much more subtle in their presentation but are nonetheless inaccurate or misleading. The amount of information available on the web is virtually limitless, making the ability to evaluate the legitimacy and usefulness of that information a critical skill. And before we can hope to help our students develop that critical skill, we must first understand and apply it ourselves.
That is why I paid particular attention to the exercise we undertook in this course to create and use a tool for evaluating Internet learning resources and the materials we studied regarding how to determine the validity of information you find on the web. I try to have a healthy degree of skepticism about everything I see on the web, but until now, I never really thought about how to determine with at least some degree of certainty which web-based information is actually true and useful.
The real challenge is that the Internet is so new, so vast and changes so rapidly that there is no precedent for processing this information. However, it is incumbent on educators who use technology resources with their students to make teaching proper information evaluation a priority.
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