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A Tale of Two Cities
 | A Tale of Two Cities
"Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see."
|  | This teachable moment, demonstrates the importance of authenticating online information. In the original lesson, students compared the New Hartford site to a site that had been created to promote the city of Howard Lake. However, as the Howard Lake site is now sponsored by a newspaper, making it much easier to verify, we have replaced it with the site for Morris, Manitoba.
Just for grins, I tried an exercise using a promotional website for Sunny Cliff, Manitoba. A town that does not actually exists, so the information used on this website was totally bogus. I told my students that I was trying to put together some information on our community for our school Web site and that I wanted them to help me by researching a couple of sample sites. I linked our school's springboard page to two towns - Sunny Cliff and Morris. The students were asked to come up with important community information to include on our site by jotting down a list of things they found at each town's site. I said I would pick up their lists at the end of the class period. When students arrived at the lab, I assigned towns so that no adjacent students would view the same site. Then I cut them loose and they proceeded to do their research. I had them log off a little bit early and then, instead of picking up their lists, I informed them that one of these towns was bogus - that the site was a fraud. The looks of shock and disbelief on some faces was one of the highlights of my year! Despite my announcement, many students insisted "I saw it Mr. Mack. It was on the Internet - it has to be true!" So I assigned them to come up with ten things that they would check the next day, to see if their site was in fact real. It was most interesting to see some of the strategies that students came up with the next day to verify information. Some checked maps, some census information, others tried schools and web searches. One student tried to add up all the members of churches, to see if it matched up with the population base, and another wanted to call a business that was listed, but didn't want to pay the charges! By the end of the second day, students were still pretty much split evenly on which site they thought was "bogus." On the third day, we had a great discussion about what they had discovered and the logic that was used in authenticating the information. Wicked me...I still haven't told them which site was a fraud (another teacher wants to try the activity), but hopefully, they do question online information just a little bit now. If my experience matches the general student population, we have much to do in developing critical thinking skills.
To complete this lesson on a light note, teachers might like to take their students to a more obvious bogus website that was created by the same person who created the New Hartford site. This humorous site for Mankato, Minnesota, features photos of lush beaches, and activities such as whale watching and deep-sea fishing - all in the American Midwest! But as your students know, not all fraudulent Web sites will be as easy to spot as this one! Note: as the Mankato Web site is intended for older teens and university students, it does include some riské humour. We suggest that teachers preview this Web site in order to determine its suitability for their students
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About the Author:
This teachable moment was created by technology educator Keith Mack.
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