Kay Cantwell Education Officer: Digital Learning

Truth on the Internet

How often have you heard students say, I read it on the Internet - it must be true! Unlike in the book publication industry, there is no editorial process prior to work being published on the internet. Therefore we see just as much accurate as inaccurate information being posted online:

The world is experiencing an explosion of information unlike anything ever seen before. In just one minute on the internet.

The internet is the most powerful, convenient and potentially manipulative medium ever invented and is continually growing.
Page | 2

FACT BUSTERS:
Google searches daily the number of webpages on Google in 2008 The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010. Internet users worldwide (June 2010). The number of blogs on the Internet Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010 People on Facebook at the end of 2010. Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month. The number of videos watched per day on YouTube. Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010). Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr. There has been a in information from 2003-2009

Page | 3

The multimodal nature of the internet allows users to create any version of truth. The man and the dog are from a separate picture there is no dog this big in the world!

Another example is the Dove Evolution ad- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U For students, the internet is the dominant medium and place they go to for information. In a world of information overload, it is vital for students to not only find information but also determine its validity and appropriateness.
Page | 4

Why does this matter?

To be digitally literate our students need to understand how searches work and have the ability to analyse and evaluate digital information. Teaching information literacy skills demystifies the process of finding and validating online information. The most current research on future 2011 Horizon report states that Sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount.

http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-Horizon-Report-K12.pdf

Where does it fit in Curriculum?

Some examples of where this is required in the Australian Curriculum are: ICT as a General Capability. One key component is Investigate where students select and evaluate data and information and apply criteria to verify the integrity of data and information and their sources, for example for usefulness, credibility, reliability, validity, relevance, bias, timeliness, author, date. Critical and creative thinking as a General Capability. Students are required learn to generate and evaluate knowledge, ideas and possibilities, and employ these skills when seeking new pathways or solutions. Historical Skills with the History discipline area. Children are required to analyses and use sources. English Skills including Interpreting, analysing, evaluating
Page | 5

Grammar of the Internet

The ability to understand the grammar of the internet and critically think about information are essential skills. This goes beyond searching skills and reading the contents of a web page. Three key grammar elements on the internet are: Knowing how to read a URL Finding out who published a website and whether the website is current Understanding links

Key One: Reading a URL When reading the URL ask yourself three questions 1. Do you recognise domain name? A domain name can sometimes provide clues about the quality of information of a site or tell you what a site is about. 2. What is the extension in the domain name? This is an important component because if students are search for sources from an Earthquake in NZ, then they could look for the most relevant sites from that specific country.

Page | 6

A great site to get students to use to identify domain names and country codes is ROOT ZONE DATABASE

Another useful site is: http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/text/web_country_codes.html 3. Are you on a personal page? A personal page is a web site created by an individual. The web site may contain useful information, links to important resources and helpful facts, but sometimes these pages offer highly biased opinions. The presence of a name in the URL such as jdoe and a tilde ~ or % or the word users, people or members frequently means you are on a personal web site. Even if a site has the extension, .edu, you still need to keep a look out for personal pages. Case in point: http://students.itmasters.edu.au/iti568/student4/

Page | 7

Key Two: Finding out who published the website You can often find the owner or publisher of a web site by using the EasyWhois? http://www.easywhois.com/ This is a database. It is sometimes helpful to know who publishes the information you are reading.

An example of what you can find out when you check this database is below:

Page | 8

In bookstores, we only see the finished product of a body of work, but the Internet allows us to explore a collection of drafts. We can chart the progress or history of a web site thanks to the Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine: www.archive.org allows you to browse through 30 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To use this site type in the URL of a site or page of which you would like to research, and click the Take Me Back button. Once you have conducted your search, select from the archived dates available. An example of the Wayback Machine in action:

Then..

Now.

Key Three: Understanding Links When children search, they usually only use one search engine and they dont normally change. They also believe the top hits are the most important. But do they understand how the hits are ranked as they are? Many businesses specialise in SEO Search Engine Optimisation. The process of getting your website to appear high in the listings returned by a search is not based on luck, but on a complex series of strategies, including how the website has been built, and what key words are embedded in the metadata of a website.
Page | 9

Page | 10

It is not necessary for students to understand SEO however they should be aware of it. A great activity to explore the way web rankings work is to get students to enter Australia into the Google search bar. The results they get are below.

Why did WIKIPEDIA get the first hit? What is common about top three sites? The search engine looks at words and tags and tries to compare with other content, which is reflected in these results. It is, however, the links that often make the most difference. Take the first site- Wikipedia address and type link: with address.

It returns a list of websites that link to the site. Quite often, the more links the website has to it, the higher it appears on the hit list. The links to the site will allow students to build a map of related commentary who uses this site and considers it important enough to link to it? Students need to be aware how the web generates results. This will allow them to question the information they find and cross-reference information and look for hidden bias. Examining a web site's external links is an important step in validating Internet information.

Page | 11

This summary might be useful as it gives a very simple overview of the PageRank algorithm.
Search (from http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tech.html)
Co-founder Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as something that understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want. We cant claim that Google delivers on that vision 100 percent today, but were always working on new technologies aimed at bringing all of Google closer to that ideal. Before you even enter your query in the search box, Google is continuously traversing the web in real time with software programs called crawlers, or Googlebots. A crawler visits a page, copies the content and follows the links from that page to the pages linked to it, repeating this process over and over until it has crawled billions of pages on the web. Next Google processes these pages and creates an index, much like the index in the back of a book. If you think of the web as a massive book, then Googles index is a list of all the words on those pages and where theyre located, as well as information about the links from those pages, and so on. The index is parceled into manageable sections and stored across a large network of computers around the world. When you type a query into the Google search box, your query is sent to Google machines and compared with all the documents stored in our index to identify the most relevant matches. In a split second, our system prepares a list of the most relevant pages and also determines the relevant sections and bits of text, images, videos and more. What you get is a list of search results with relevant information excerpted in snippets (short text summary) beneath each result. Describing the basic crawling, indexing and serving processes of a search engine is just part of the story. The other key ingredients of Google search are:

Relevance. As Larry said long ago, we want to give you back exactly what you want. When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the importance of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis. For example, we offer personalized search results based on your web history and location. Comprehensiveness. Google launched in 1998 with just 25 million pages, which even then was a small fraction of the web. Today we index billions and billions of webpages, and our index is roughly 100 million gigabytes. We continue investing to expand the comprehensiveness of our services. In 2007 we introduced Universal Search, which made search more comprehensive by integrating images, videos, news, books and more into our main search results. Freshness. In the early days, Googlebots crawled the web every three or four months, which meant that the information you found on Google typically was out of date. Today were continually crawling the web ensuring that you can find the latest news, blogs and status updates minutes or even seconds after theyre posted. Speed. Our average query response time is roughly one-fourth of a second. In comparison, the average blink of an eye is one-tenth of a second. Speed is a major search priority, which is why in general we dont turn on new features if they will slow our services down. Instead, search engineers are always working not just on new features, but ways to make search even faster. In addition to smart coding, on the back end weve developed distributed computing systems around that globe that ensure you get fast response times. With technologies like autocomplete and Google Instant, we help you find the search terms and results youre looking for before youre even finished typing.

Page | 12

A simple scaffold for children to validate Web materials could be Alan Novembers 4 step process called real.

Images used with permission under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/2595497078 http://www.flickr.com/photos/tamper/5123660766 http://blaugh.com/2007/06/11/link-popularity-vs-pagerank-vs-yoda/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/captainmath/5157857685

Page | 13