Validating Information and Resolving Information Conflicts (Published in the TechEdge, 1998-99) by Wesley A. Fryer www.wesfryer.com   The 1996-97 academic year was an exciting time for fourth grade students at Wheelock Elementary School in Lubbock, Texas. For the first time, student work was not only published within the school building and shared with parents, students, and teachers, but some essays were published on the schools' internet website. Documents published in the fall included a short expository paper about carnivorous plants written by a fourth grader. Later in the semester, the school received an email message from an individual in the Philippines who was trying to grow Venus Flytrap plants, and needed some advice about their proper care. What tremendous excitement that email message generated for the young man who had written the essay! The respondent's email message clearly dramatized the motivational potential of the world-wide web as a global publishing platform for even elementary age students. It also, however, highlighted a significant academic challenge relating to internet content: determining the authenticity and credibility of a document and its author. While the fourth grade student who wrote the paper about carnivorous plants was certainly enthusiastic about his topic and committed to writing an accurate essay, he was also not the leading horticultural specialist in Lubbock for exotic plants. Starting at the third grade level, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for Technology require students to "apply critical analysis to resolve information conflicts and validate information" (§126.3.b.6.A). The advent of the world-wide web and the ease with which "webpages" can be created has made everyone with access to a computer a potential publisher for an international audience. In today's classroom, students are likely to regard any content from the internet as gospel truth, while information obtained from a newspaper or other "traditional" source is viewed with mild distrust. As educators in the information age, we must teach students how to determine the credibility of web content. Additionally, we must teach them to recognize bias and outright fiction published as truth on the web, and provide them with skills to resolve conflicts between information sources. This article will suggest methods to achieve these goals. A full text copy of this article and links to referenced resources is available at http://www.wtvi.com/teks.   The Importance of Validation The process of validating information has not historically received a large amount of emphasis in K-12 classrooms. The primary reason was that content presented to students (via textbooks) was carefully selected, filtered, and written by academic specialists subject to a rigorous accountability system. School boards have and continue to reject textbooks through the adoption process if they contain content deemed controversial or even false. The recent science textbook adoption process in Texas and the debate over the text's treatment of the theory of evolution is an example. Students have not had to concern themselves with validating the authenticity of information, because adults have historically performed that task in selecting textbooks, library books, and periodicals for student use at school. That traditional classroom setting, in which student access to information is limited and carefully controlled, contrasts sharply with the access to information offered to students by the internet's world-wide web. As a largely unregulated archive of textual and graphic information, the web lacks an overarching librarian. The absence of a metaphorical "librarian" makes the web's content disorganized, uncensored, and difficult to validate. A plethora of search engines have emerged which attempt to impose order on the web and allow documents to be located via keyword or Boolean searches (for a further description of this process, see http://www.wtvi.com/teks/article3.html). A number of companies have created products which filter or "block" websites deemed inappropriate for children (links to over twenty such software products are available at http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Computers/Software/Internet/Blocking_and_Filtering/) There are not, however, a large number of resources to assist educators, parents, and students in validating the authenticity and accuracy of webpage content. The dramatic need for this validation process may surprise you. Consider the topic of the Holocaust. A simple keyword search of Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) for the word "Holocaust" produces links to 6 Yahoo "categories" and over 250 individual websites. These range from The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/) to an article titled "Homosexual Holocaust - Another Gay Militant Myth?" (http://campus.leaderu.com/marco/special/spc16.html). To the credit of Yahoo, which is a human-indexed search engine, most of the links to sites contending that the Holocaust never occurred are labeled "Holocaust denial" or "Holocaust revisionism." A keyword search of a computer-indexed search engine like Altavista (http://www.altavista.digital.com), however, does not include helpful editorial comments about revisionism and denial. The same simple keyword search yielded over 275,000 relevant links, including one on the eighth page of links to an article titled 'Palestinian Authority Television: Jews Use Holocaust Myth for Profit' (http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/pamyth.html). The article states "It is well-known that every year the Jews exaggerate what the Nazis did to them. They claim there were 6 million killed, but precise scientific research demonstrates that there were no more than 400,000….." It is imperative that we prepare students to correctly resolve information conflicts like those presented by webpages like this one about the Holocaust.   Big "T" Truth For many years in university academia, the process of rejecting the very concept of "truth" and imbuing students with moral relativism has been in vogue (see Lynn Cheney's book, Telling the Truth, for further elaboration on this topic). Social scientists have misconstrued Thomas Kuhn's statements about objectivity and subjectivity in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to mean that objectivity is impossible, and that objective truth (or Big "T" Truth as my college philosophy instructor said) does not exist. It is critical that as we teach students to analyze competing sources of information about a subject, such as the Holocaust, we emphasize the existence and importance of Truth. While it is correct that people can have different recollections of the same event, their different perceptions of what occurred do NOT equate to different "truths" about what happened. The Holocaust DID occur, and millions of people WERE killed. It was an incident of history which we can universally recognize as wrong. Is this philosophical discussion about truth and values really necessary to teach students how to validate information and resolve information conflicts? In many cases, no. However, in cases like the Holocaust, its importance cannot be overstated. As educators preparing the future citizens of our nation, we have a moral obligation to teach the existence of truth over the destructive lie of relativism. Perceptions do not create objective reality. Everything is NOT subjective. An underlying commitment to this premise should precede any classroom skill instruction about internet content validation.   Methods for Content Validation Since anyone can publish their ideas on the world-wide web, validating the accuracy and credibility of information can be tricky. These suggestions can help you and your students in this difficult process. Check the domain of the referenced URL Whenever students copy data from an internet webpage, they should record the URL (uniform resource locator, or webpage address) where they obtained the text or graphics. The "domain" is the root address of the URL. The domain name usually comes right before the period and three-character domain identifier of the address (com for commerical, edu for educational, gov for government, org for organization, etc.) If the domain is cnn.com, irs.gov, or nationalgeographic.com, that means the webpage is hosted (respectively) by the Cable News Network, the US Government's Internal Revenue Service, or The National Geographic Society. Most people would consider these sources credible. If the domain of the webpage is deemed reliable, the content of the page can likely be trusted. Reliability is harder to ascertain when analyzing the URL if the domain is educational (ends in "edu"), commercial (ends in "com"), or a network (ends in "net") and is not a readily recognized information source. Colleges and universities around the world grant free web space to their students who use it to publish their ideas, information about their interests, hobbies, etc. The fact that a webpage's domain is mit.edu (from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology) does not automatically guarantee its accuracy or reliability. The page could be the personal publication of any undergraduate student, graduate student, or faculty member at MIT. The person could be a political extremist, an anarchist, or a cult member. The fact that the webpage is hosted by an educational institution cannot satisfy an academic need for validation. Similarly, a page hosted by a commercial organization like America Online (aol.com) or Geocities (geocities.com) could be authored by anyone in the world. Other methods must be employed in these cases for validation. Look for a bibliography Academic papers usually contain a bibliography, footnootes, or a "works cited" section. Teach students to look for this type of source documentation when they are analyzing a webpage for accuracy. The potential validity of a document is greater if documentation is included, since it usually indicates a more serious academic treatise. Students can find additional sources of information in bibliographies, and can also observe proper methods of footnoting and documenting sources. The mere existence of a bibliography does not automatically validate a webpage's content, but it does increase the credibility of the author by revealing their academic focus. Look for academic credentials Students should follow links at the beginning or end of a document which give further information about the author. Sometimes, author links will include academic vitas or resumes. Obviously, if the individual is a tenured professor at Harvard (and the website domain is harvard.edu), the webpage content is likely valid. The Asian Crisis webpage discussed later in this article includes an author's link, revealing that he is an Associate Professor of Economics and International Business at New York University. Possession of graduate degrees do not guarantee that the author is an expert in the topic discussed on the webpage being examined, but their possession does increase the credibility of the document and its author. Look for other published materials Train students to look for links to other published materials by the same author. Often by linking to an author's homepage, you can learn a great deal about their interests and academic qualifications (as discussed above). Especially look for "traditionally published" materials, that is, textbooks and other books written by the author of the webpage under examination. An author who is well published in a particular field is more likely to be a reliable source. Look for associated links Teach students to identify the political leanings of a webpage author by analyzing the content of their homepage. Does the homepage include links to Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, indicating a conservative bent, or is the page full of links to neo-nazi or militia groups? Links to other high quality resources can indicate a serious researcher and a valid source. An excellent example of this type of webpage is Nouriel Roubini's Asia Crisis Homepage at http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~nroubini/asia/AsiaHomepage.html. The page contains hundreds of links to information describing all aspects of the Asian economic crisis, from sources in east Asia as well as the United States. The high quality of this extensive list increases the credibility of the webpage's author. Look for high quality writing Instruct students to look for spelling errors and grammatical mistakes which could indicate that the document was not written by a scholar. Certainly, the use of profanity or other inappropriate language would substantially reduce the document's credibility as an academic resource. Find resources from credible link lists Instead of looking for webpage content on a search engine like AltaVista, start your search from a credible, known internet source like The Discovery Channel Online (www.discovery.com) or Classroom Connect (www.classroom.net). Links from these sources have been checked for accuracy and validity prior to inclusion. This technique is analogous to asking your school librarian for a resource. Encourage class debate and role play Students need to learn about the perspectives and opinions of others in order to appreciate the challenges of conflict resolution and the competing interests at stake. After researching different sides of a particular issue, have students debate a specific question and assume the roles of key actors. This process can help students separate facts from opinions, and sift through contradictory information to arrive at reasonable conclusions about "the truth."   No Substitute for Cultural Literacy As E.D. Hirsch, author of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, has observed, students must possess a large amount of background knowledge to effectively communicate in our society. Students do not merely need "general knowledge," they need specific "world knowledge" to provide schema for communication, learning, and growth. The core knowledge website (www.coreknowledge.org) offers lesson plans and insights into this "Hirsch curriculum" and philosophy. Without requisite cultural literacy, students cannot possibly weigh the validity of a Palestinian webpage claiming the Holocaust has been vastly exaggerated. As Hirsch observed in 1987, "More and more of our young people don't know things we used to assume they knew." As we strive to help students validate webpage information and resolve information conflicts, we should simultaneously attempt to impart concepts of cultural literacy vital to the success of individuals as well as our nation in the new millinium. Wesley Fryer is a computer teacher, inservice presenter, and website developer in Lubbock, Texas. He welcomes your questions and comments at wesfryer@yahoo.com Tools for the TEKS home | Article Archive | Technology Workshops Mailing List | Feedback | Tools and Techniques | Technology Idea Exchange Contact me using this webform. Links to my blogs are also available. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.