23 Four Moves and a Habit
Evaluating Web Sources
Mike Caulfield; Liz Delf; Rob Drummond; and Kristy Kelly
Adapted by Liz Delf, Rob Drummond, and Kristy Kelly
The web is a unique terrain, substantially different from print materials. Too often, attempts at teaching information literacy for the web do not take into account both the web’s unique challenges and its unique affordances.
Much web literacy I’ve seen either asks students to look at web pages and think about them or teaches them to publish and produce things on the web. While both of these activities are valuable, neither addresses a set of real problems students confront daily: evaluating the information that reaches them through their social media streams. For these daily tasks, students need concrete strategies and tactics for tracing claims to sources and for analyzing the nature and reliability of those sources.
The web gives us many such strategies, tactics, and tools, which, properly used, can get students closer to the truth of a statement or image within seconds. Unfortunately, we do not teach students these specific techniques. As many people have noted, the web is both the largest propaganda machine ever created and the most amazing fact-checking tool ever invented. But if we haven’t taught our students those fact-checking capabilities, is it any surprise that propaganda is winning?
This chapter is an unabashedly practical quick-start guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.
Introducing SIFT
Stop
The first move is the simplest. Stop reminds you of two things.
First, when you first hit a page and start to read it—stop. Ask yourself whether you know and trust the website or source of the information. If you don’t, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Don’t read it or share it until you know what it is.
Second, after you begin the process and use the moves, it can be too easy to go down a rabbit hole, chasing after more and more obscure facts or getting lost in a “click cycle.” If you feel yourself getting overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts, stop and take a second to remind yourself what your goal is. Adjust your strategy if it isn’t working. Make sure you approach the problem at the right amount of depth for your purpose.
Investigate the Source
We’ll go more into this move in the next lesson. The key idea is to know what you’re reading before you read it.
This doesn’t mean you have to do a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into a source before you engage with it. But if you’re reading a piece on economics by a Nobel Prize–winning economist, you should know that before you read it. Conversely, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits of milk consumption that was put out by the dairy industry, you probably want to know that as well.
This doesn’t mean the Nobel economist will always be right and that the