Telling the Turkeys from the Treasures - User-Generated Content in Academic Contexts
As this year’s Intute Advent Calendar posts have shown, the applications of Web 2.0 technology are many and various. But user-generated content is still often viewed with suspicion in academic circles.
Its greatest strength – the huge pool of potential contributors – can also be its biggest weakness, as it’s not always obvious where the information comes from or how reliable it is. Many educators are increasingly aware that it’s therefore vital for students to receive training on how to distinguish good Web content from bad. A few suggestions are given below.
Five positive habits to encourage
- Checking the author’s credentials – Some contributors will give a significant amount of information about themselves (see, for example, the Wikipedia user-page of the author of an earlier post in the Intute Advent Calendar). Others prefer to remain anonymous – and while that doesn’t automatically mean the content is poor, it does mean students will need to find other reasons to believe it trustworthy.
- Selecting the right tool for the job – For example, a discussion forum might be a great place to discover a range of views on a controversial topic, but probably isn’t the place to look for more formal arguments, developed at greater length.
- Looking beyond the main body text – If the site is a wiki, the history and discussion pages may include useful information. When a topic has provoked heated debate and numerous revisions, there’s additional need to be careful that the current version of the page offers the key information. With blog posts, it’s worth looking at the comments, as these may highlight alternative perspectives.
- Seeing what other people say about the site – A Google Advanced Search allows you to see who links to it, and to check whether the resource has received positive or negative comments elsewhere on the Web – or if it’s been reviewed by a site like Intute.
- Cross referencing – The Web makes it easy to compare a number of information sources to see if they agree – which can help to confirm facts (or flag up mistaken information), and to give a range of views for more controversial topics.
For those who want to go further, there are various creative ways to incorporate user-generated content in teaching. For example, I read about one teacher who set his students an interesting assignment: he challenged them to find a Wikipedia article that contained a mistake, and correct it – encouraging them to look critically at the material, and at the same time driving home the point that user-generated content isn’t infallible.
Intute offers a number of resources designed to help students identify trustworthy information sources. Encouraging Critical Thinking Online is a set of teaching resources for classroom or seminar use, while Internet Detective is an interactive tutorial students can work through at their own pace. Internet Detective is part of the Virtual Training Suite, a set of almost sixty tutorials covering a wide range of academic disciplines.
Image credits:
- ~Yes! Another Turkey!, from a photo on Flickr by ~Sage~, licensed under Creative Commons
