Nicola McNee's List: Information Skills

• information tainted by ignorance
• inept communication
• deliberate deception
• "You have to do some investigation before you accept anything you find online,"
• "Who is the author?"
• easywhois.com
• If the author provides a way to ask questions, communicate, or add comments,
• Who are these other people whose opinions you are trusting? Is the site a .gov  or .edu?

  • Could actually make a visual dial which students use to follow through q's about authorship
• Take the website's design into account - professional design should not be seen  as a certain indicator of accurate content,
• Does the author provide sources for factual claims, and what happens when you  search on the names of the authors of those sources? Have others linked to this  page, and if so, who are they (use the search term "link: http://..." and Google  shows you every link to a specified page).
• See if the source has been bookmarked on a social bookmarking service like Delicious or Diigo;
• bias
• A good question to ask yourself, particularly when a website asks you to  download something to your own computer, is "might somebody be trying to put one  over on me?"
  
• authority
• I would add credibility points if a source is a verified professor at a known  institution of higher learning,
• Triangulate.
  
• try to find three different ways to test a source's credibility.
• Know how to use online filters
• Just as thinking like a detective is a strategy for trying to determine the  credibility of webinfo, thinking like an intelligence analyst is a strategy for  trying to gauge the credibility of online reports about breaking news events.
• The biases of trusted sources like newspapers and television need to be examined  critically
• understanding the vocabulary of visual deception
• How much work is it to check three links before believing or passing along  health information you find online?

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