Developing
Internet literacy for college bound NNS students
FRIDAY, April
2 8:30-9:30
Ishbel
Galloway, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
Rationale
Increasingly,
the WWW is the preferred source of information for undergraduate students'
term paper research. It's convenient, it's current, it's easily searchable
and yet unreliable content and the weak web literacy skills of NNS students
make it an extremely treacherous research source. We need to teach our students
the skills required to navigate the web and evaluate its content if they are
to become effective users of online material in their college courses.
It
is vital to consider your students' particular areas of weakness when planning
a web literacy activity. Sites must be chosen that they will find challenging
and not just entertaining. I teach almost exclusively students from China
and I am stunned by how rarely they recognize humor, bias, or disinformation
on internet sites.
Goals
The
Activity
Before
going to the lab
Begin
with a discussion of research sources in general. When you look at print sources,
how do you determine usefulness? In the library, how do you decide
if a book or an article is useful to your research? How do you choose journals
in an electronic database? Discuss authority, purpose, objectivity, accuracy,
currency.
In
the lab
Assign
pairs of students according to your knowledge of their cultural familiarity
and maturity, and direct them to the webpage that you wish them to evaluate.
(If you can, do this from an online course page; itŐs much faster if they
can access their pages from hyperlinks rather than having to type in the URL.) You should also provide them with some
kind of simple evaluation form that they can take notes on:
|
Evaluating
web pages - in class assignment
Go
to the Academic Writing homepage and follow the link for your group.
Carefully examine this site together and make notes below.
After
about 10 minutes, I will ask you to show this page to the class using
the LCD projector and tell us your impressions of the page.
|
|
Authority
- Who is responsible for this page? What is his/her expertise?
|
|
|
Purpose
- What is the motivation for putting this page on the Net?
|
|
|
Objectivity
- What is the author's relationship to this material?
|
|
|
Accuracy
- Is the information reliable? How can you tell?
|
|
|
Currency
- How up to date is the information? How often is new information added?
|
|
Sample
online activity A and B
After
15-20 minutes, have each pair present their webpage to the class (LCD projector
is essential) and have them explain their conclusions. Encourage the other
students to ask questions or challenge as the case may be. If they fail to
see problems, ask questions to try to steer them in the right direction.
Follow-up
After
students have presented their sites and the clues to unreliability have been
identified, students can be directed to any one of a number of online internet
literacy tutorials to review what has been discussed (see list of tutorial
sites below).
Students
then evaluate some sites that they might use for whatever current research
assignment they are working on, using an online evaluation form. Again there
are a number of these online at various tutorial sites. You can also create
your own (download sample here). Note
that it is important to explain that major media, corporate and government
sites are not appropriate for this assignment.
FINDING SAMPLE WEBSITES
There
are dozens of websites that can be used for this activity. However, it is
important to choose sites that you believe will challenge your students. Their
cultures of origin
and familiarity
with North American culture, especially its humor, must be carefully considered.
