What’s up with this?
In the past couple of months, we’ve been experiencing an odd phenomenon around here: people calling Mr. Improbable to find out if his website is real or a hoax. These are usually students — and once or twice, teachers — who call, on speakerphone, from a classroom.
Presumably, the idea is to teach critical thinking skills, and how to evaluate information on the internet.
Sometimes, we get e-mails. Mr. Improbable’s webmaster forwarded him this one yesterday:
hi my friend and i shane want to know if your website is credible or not. “http://improb.com/airchives/classical/cat/cat.html” You may think why the heck are we talking to you about this. but we are in school and are practicing how to know if sites are credible sources or not. so please let us know asap.
… and as she noted, “determining someone/something’s credibility often requires asking uninterested third parties who are not directly associated with the entity in question.” Well, and tactfully, put.
Parents, have your children experienced the ridiculousness of this particular assignment? Seriously, what is going on here?
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8 Responses to “What’s up with this?”
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That’s odd. We teach our students how to evaluate the credibility of a website when we are teaching information technology skills, but that evaluation never involves ACTUALLY EMAILING THE WEBSITE CREATOR to ask them about it. How bizarre.
I guess the owner of a hoax website is unlikely to admit it’s a hoax anyway. Anything on the web needs to be treated with caution (except this site of course). Wikipedia is not a hoax, but it does contain misinformation and partial points of view (despite the best efforts of the managers). A whole suit of skills, including common sense, is needed when assessing sites.
I’m not sure how my mother teaches her students how to evaluate internet sources…but seeing as there’s a bibliography RIGHT ON THE PAGE it would make more sense to locate those documents than contact a website creator.
No, I was never taught by Emmanuel College to call/e-mail a webmaster to verify the credibility of a website. That’s just crazy.
I think the seminar on plagiarism that all freshman are required to take goes over some ways to determine the credibility of a website as well, when properly siting from a website was discussed.
But seriously, calling the editor/webmaster just isn’t a good idea for this. Like a hoax site owner wouldn’t just lie?!
Danielle D., that’s always the question Marc asks them, too. “If this were a hoax, do you think I’d tell you?” Stumps them every time. I think last time, the person just hung up.
Oh, and for any of my FB friends who also read this blog — when I vaguebooked “Oh, this is a good one” a couple of days ago, I was referring to being on the listening end of one of these calls.
Makes me want to tell them that the word “gullible” is not in the dictionary!
Yeah, that’s insane. One of the sites I used for my evaluating websites unit belonged to a friend of mine, and I used to gleefully relate to him what the students said about it — but that was not actually part of the curriculum. (The star of that lesson, btw, was the “Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide” site.)
Improbable.com appears on several lists of “hoax” websites for use in classroom discussions.
http://deep.syr.edu/curriculum/KMY/lesson_plan_2.pdf
https://sites.google.com/a/wvde.k12.wv.us/wv-lms/information-literacy/hoax-sites
http://www.studyplans.com/Evaluatingwebsites.htm
http://www2.csusm.edu/ilast/webevalart.htm
But none of the ones I looked at actually recommend CONTACTING the site owner, though they do recommend noting whether contact information is provided. Perhaps a teacher using these resources got overzealous.
@Fillyjonk — …or perhaps a student misunderstood a teacher’s suggestion of looking for a website publisher’s contact info, as a marker of credibility. Having taught website evaluation as part of information literacy, I’m amazed sometimes by how literal-minded (even) college students can be.