Web Literacy for Educators

Alan C. November

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781452294155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstechnologie

The author offers exercises, examples, handouts, and basic tips to help both learners and educators find and evaluate information on the Web for quality and validity.

1

Web Basics for Critical Thinking

My own introduction to critical thinking on the Web was the result of a high school student, Zack, handing in a term paper called, “The Historic Myth of Concentration Camps.” Of course, the teacher was horrified by her student’s lack of discrimination of a source on the Web claiming that the Holocaust was really a medical response to save the Jews from the rampant spread of typhus caused by head lice. This was 1998, when only a few schools had access to the Web. The school’s initial response was to punish the student. What made the event intriguing and even more complicated was the address of the Web site: http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/intro. This page no longer exists at Northwestern University, but at the time, it was an individual professor’s Web page.

When I had a chance to interview the student and asked why he thought the content to be valid, he understandably told me that the Northwestern University address provided the authority he needed to believe the content to be the latest historic research. What he had never learned in school was how to decode a Web address. The tilde (~) character was all the punctuation he needed to know that the address was a personal opinion and not an official document of the university. He had been sent to the Web to find a source, but he was never taught how to validate and cross-reference his sources. The Web has its own punctuation and grammar. It is different, but not much more complicated than the grammar of print and paper. Before we send students to the Web for research, they should be prepared to understand the basic rules of how the content is organized, referenced, and validated. Once our students have a basic grounding in the “grammar of the Internet,” they can engage in critical thinking.

The rules of research have changed with society’s move from paper to digital information. When we were growing up, we were taught to select our reference content from the library. Our range of content was controlled. Stacks of books with authors, titles, and publishers were easy to find; fiction and nonfiction were clearly organized. Digital technology has changed all that. The old controls are gone. Our students can now find information in reference sources, such as the National Archives, that only scholars would have had access to. In addition, they have a direct connection to a global social network beyond our imaginations. Students can write to specialists directly, post their ideas for debate on the blogs of political commentators in London, and get links from professional journals and podcasts from experts. The potential is mind-boggling.

What this shift of control means is that the role of the teacher is more important than ever. Now it is essential that we teach our children the discipline of making meaning from a very complex and constantly shifting global warehouse of information and communication.

To think critically about the information we accessed, we had to learn the grammar and structure of print information. As we all know, it is essential to know the author of a book, how to use the index, the value of checking footnotes, and to cross-reference. These same steps must also be applied to digital information. It is very important to understand that the Internet has a very different way of organizing information than paper technology. In many ways, there are more skills of cross-referencing to master on the Internet than in the world of paper. Once we learn these skills, we are all in much better command of how information and communication influences our thinking and decision making. For example, if the top search result in Google for the search phrase “global warming” is owned by the American Petrolium Institute, it would be important to understand that they may have purchased the key phrase, “global warming”, in order to ensure that you would find their Web site at the top of your results. Can you imagine purchasing keywords in the Dewey Decimal System or buying your way to the front of the card catalogue!

In this first chapter, you will be introduced to the basics about thinking critically about Web information. The basics begin with an understanding of the structure of the Web, its punctuation, and its grammar. The contents of this chapter are elementary to understanding how the Web works and how it is organized. The purpose is to provide you with some clear definitions and practical ideas to learn and teach the basics of the Internet to your students. It is the first step toward Web literacy and critical thinking. Let the adventure begin.

THE ESSENTIALS

What Is the Internet?

The Internet is a network of many different computers, all over the world, connected together. The network allows computers to talk to each other even though they may be separated by large distances, are made by different manufacturers, and run on different kinds of operating systems.

IP Addresses

The Internet works by allowing Web browsers (software for retrieving Web pages) to call up addresses, much like ordinary mail. These addresses are called Internet protocol (IP) addresses. An example of such an address might be 212.58.240.33.

Are your eyes glazing over? Not to worry. You normally do not see an address written in this numeric form while browsing the Web. Instead you will see text with slashes and dots like this: http://www.cnn.com/. Every IP address also has a corresponding domain name. This makes remembering and navigating to Web sites much easier.

Domain Names

In the CNN Web address, cnn.com is the domain name. A domain name can have two or possibly three components. The first component is created by the owner of a site. No one can create a name if it has already been assigned to someone else. For example, the rights to use the domain cnn.com have already been purchased. Nobody else can use that domain name unless CNN decides they no longer wish to purchase the rights.

The second component is called a TLD, or top level domain, and is designated for certain groups or categories. Examples of these categories are .com for commercial, .gov for government, and .edu for educational sites. If navigating to a site that is hosted in another country there will be an additional extension, called a count...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• On the Web
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1. Web Basics for Critical Thinking
• 2. The Empowered Researcher
• 3. Get REAL: How to Validate Information on the Web
• 4. Look at the Links
• 5. Research Outside the Box: A Guide to Smart Searching
• 6. Expanding the Boundaries: Blogs, RSS, Podcasts, and Wikis
• 7. Strategies and Evaluation: Putting It All Together
• References
• Index