Determining the validity of information

I'm now reading over the exercises that students did in the lab last week, the one where they had to answer 5 questions about the validity of the sites they found. Some kids get this, but others have a pretty limited notion of validity. One student writes, "The newpaper must be valid because it wouldn't lie about the information it gives to local citizens." How interesting! He's not alone in this. Despite the fact that many say that we live in a cynical age, when it comes to research, students seem willing to trust sources--IF it means (I suspect) that they can use the source and don't have to look for another one! Perhaps means "valid enough for me to get away with using." Which, I suppose, is fair enough. But it's something we'll have to consider as we go forward.

I thought we ran into some interesting issues with the links check. Some pages might have had solid information but few links and it's hard to get kids to understand this. We ran into this with the .gov sites as well as the newspaper sites (NYTimes, for example). Kids are looking for a cut-and-dried test: 50 links = OK; 10 links = not so good. Getting them to look at WHO was linking to these sites (not just the numbers) was a stumbling block.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. They're just learning. This IS a step in the right direction from the position, "If I find it on the web, it must be valid." I sometimes forget that baby steps ARE steps forward.

I'm not sure how useful the wayback machine was, though, down the road, it would be useful for kids to check this. It's just not the first thing worth checking. It might be useful to have them find out info about the page's author or sponsoring organization. One student found a site from the Heritage Foundation and wrote that this info was certainly valid because a foundation was a large organization, not knowing the the H.F. was a very right-wing group. A simple google search would have helped him to discover this. I'll bring this up in class.