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Dan: On the line with me today is Frances Jacobson Harris who is a librarian at the University Laboratory High School in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.  She is a contributing author in The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning which explores core issues facing young people in the digital world.

So just tell us about what it is that you are doing research on and what are some of the insights that you are gleaning as you are going through this.

Frances: 
Well, I started out trying to understand what some of the constraints or barriers are to teaching credibility assessment because it seems like it doesn't happen that much which was surprising me. when I go around and talk or visit with other librarians, they are in situations that make it a little difficult to do this kind of instruction. So the way that I am framing my work is to kind of look at two ways that we have trouble teaching this topic of credibility assessment.

One is that, I am calling it structural. It's the way that our schools are organized. That is things that we have in place to protect kids like filters. We are in the midst of No Child Left Behind and high stakes testing and so suddenly there is not time to teach anything except test preparation - those core math and reading skills that are going to lead to the test.

There are other sort of structural barriers that are not so obvious in that way. For example, a lot of teachers themselves don't know that much about how to evaluate information on the web. It is kind of amazing to me how many teachers don't really understand what Wikipedia is - as an example - let alone the nuances of it when it might be the best source to use, when it might be the worst source to use. Time is a real issue.

Then, when we do teach it, we teach it in - we're kind of taking our old ways of teaching and just applying it to these new environments. We're thinking of the Internet as a source for academic information only. So that the typical checklists that teachers use are drawn along very narrow lines. Is the information accurate? Is it current?...and you give students these little "Yes" "No" checkboxes and the students are sitting there going, "Well, sort of, maybe." There's no room on the little form, on the worksheet to write "Maybe" or "In this situation it would work this way, in that situation it wouldn't work."

Dan: So, can you give me an example of what a broader category might be that would make it more useful on that checklist?

Frances: Well, a broader category would be actually rather simple: Take away the little boxes and make lines. (laughing) And ask students, When would you use a source like this and why would it be appropriate in that situation? Or to develop a scenario, an information scenario that a student would have to respond to. Now these are a lot harder to grade, obviously.

Dan: Ya, sounds like it.

Frances: Right. Or corroboration techniques. That's another way to do it. So that you take a piece of information that you find on one source and then check it with two or three other sources and see if you are finding the same information.

Dan : And is that driven by the fact that we have so many more different types of sources than we used to have? Is that really what's at the core of this issue?

Frances: Yes and no. You know, we've always had these other types of sources. But I think one of the problems with the checklist is that it only measures information that you are going to use for academic purposes. So, I'll turn this around a little bit. You walk into a school library. There you have on the shelves Sports Illustrated magazine, Car and Driver magazine, Seventeen. Yet the students who come into the library, even though they can read those magazines, they cannot go, they are not allowed to use the computers to go to the web sites of Car and Driver.

Somehow when we think of kids using online sources we are even more restrictive with how they use those sources. And then our evaluation tools are also very restrictive when you've got this web environment where expertise is really flattened and really spread. What we are presenting to the students - and maybe this is a good way of summing it up - is kind of an artificial Internet or sort of a sanitized one that therefore they can't see a more realistic range of information - it's very, very hard to assess credibility. If they can't do the searching on their own, if they can't do the selecting on their own, then it's also very, very difficult to do the evaluation.

It’s been a great journey for me and mainly because of the people I have worked with.  I might take just enough credit to say ‘I kicked it off’ but what kept it going were all the other people who have been involved in this project.  So, it has been a pleasure for me.

Dan:  I love this idea of giving them a scenario and saying, OK, here's a resource. Now, in what situations would this be a really credible source. That's almost like turning the whole process on it's head from the way that we've been doing it where we've said, Here's a checklist. Go out and find a source that meets these criteria.

Frances: Right. One of the things that I've learned in doing this research is that students don't often internalize the checklists. They don't remember those criteria. They aren't so meaningful to them. Yet they do develop personal checklists. And I think that by proposing scenarios like that they are more likely to do that.

So, getting back to when I was talking about the structural barriers. The other one that I think of - and I just made this up, so there's, I'm not taking this from anyone and it could be sliced and diced in different ways - but I think of them as dynamic barriers. And that would be the nature of adolescent development where you've got kids at different stages of their cognitive development and their emotional development. Where they are along that continuum is going to make a difference in how they evaluate what they see.

The other thing that is very, very dynamic is, of course, the web. And just the way information is presented there and how it is constantly changing. So that a cue in the print world like if you look at a book. You have a title page; you have a publisher; you have all these markers that identify credibility. On a web site you don't necessarily have that. The way I think of this as being dynamic is that it's all that squishy stuff. The viewer, the learner is squishy and the web is squishy - that's a given.

I think a lot of librarians, as an example, like to use spoof sites when they do web site evaluation.

Dan:  Ya, we see that a lot.

Frances: I think that using spoof sites with younger kids can be really effective. They have to be very careful readers; it can be a very enjoyable activity; it's very motivating and it's safe and it works. Yet they can see, they can pick out the things that might be problematic there and start to develop some of those heuristics within themselves, some of those strategies for evaluating what they are seeing.

I think the spoof site strategy is a little less effective with older students because it sends them a message that a site that isn't real, those are the only ones that are bad. It's too much pretend, it's too much play.

Dan: Where do you see this whole area of credibility going in the next year or two with the way that the Internet is developing?

Frances: We're going to have a proliferation of read/write technologies. So that I think the web is going to start looking more and more Wikipedia-like. All the sharing of information that is going on so that it is harder and harder to figure out the source of information.

So for that I think that what we are going to have to be teaching is well, Whodunit kinds of exercises - figuring out "who really put this here?", "who is responsible for this information?", "what can I contribute to it?". That's definitely one thing that I see happening.

At the same time I think that we can use some of those same tools to teach. We can have students collaboratively creating evaluation tools or spaces online with wikis and what not - journals that they keep online to share their discoveries about their findings. So, we can play too.

Dan:  This has been fascinating talking with you. So thank you for interacting with us and we'll look forward to seeing the finished product of what you are researching and writing.

Frances: Thanks a lot, Dan.

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Dan:  This is a production of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project at the Illinois Math and Science Academy.