Information+Validation

Ok, like I was saying... think about a made-up student, let's call him "Bobby". Bobby needs to research The Holocaust during WWII for a school project, and like many of us, he went to his favorite search engine, google and typed away. He found what he thought were some good resources, and completed his project based on the resources. His teacher and classmates were shocked when he presented his project research. Bobby relied on some folks for information who had a different idea about history in mind...

His research came from a College Professor at Northwestern University, Arthur Butz (Abutz for short). On his website, it says that he is a college professor at a well respected University (he doesn't come right out and tell you that he's a wacko). He also has a page titled "A Short Introduction to the Study of Holocaust Revisionism." Bobby reads the article, and comes to the conclusion that the Nazi's were actually doing the Jewish people a favor as they put them in concentration camps. Professor Butz didn't seem like a fanatic wierdo to Bobby when he read the page... he seemed like someone who really knew history.

In this case, it's too bad that Bobby got tricked into believing something that he could have verified, had he only had a few tools to do it. This is a real web site, and although Bobby is made up, the web site was taken down shortly after Northwestern University found out about it. You can read their response here: http://www.ibiblio.org/team/history/controversy/970107-Butz.html

It's an interesting world...

The other day, you looked at a few web sites, and hopefully found that the one that was not a spoof was the invisibility cloak article. All of the others were false.

There are four steps that you can use to verify a web site and check to see if it is what you hope it to be.

First, check the URL - the web address. The address can give you all kinds of information that will help you know if a website is "just some guy" or if it has some legitimacy.

In Bobby's example, this was the web site... http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html. How about in the examples you had in class last week?

Let's take a look at what we can learn from the URL: You should ask yourself three questions when you look at a URL...

1. Do you recognize the domain name?

If you truncate the URL back to the homepage, you can see that the domain name is northwestern.edu, which is the domain name for the University. In the United States, the extension .edu confirms that it is actually an k12 school, college or university. In other countries, it is sometimes .ac for universities. If you recognize the domain name, it's usually a good sign. You should also consider whether that domain would typically have good information or not.

2. What is the extension?

Other extensions that you should know... .k12 - United States schools .edu - educational organization (colleges / Universities) .ac - academic institution (not in the US) .com or .biz - Commercial or business .gov - government agency .net - network (many Internet Service Providers have a .net address) .mil - military institution (US)

3. Is it someone's personal page? There are several tips that help you know that this page is actually not a University page, but this guy's personal page. Here are the tips when checking the URL for Professor Butz...

1. the URL includes his name - abutz 2. there is a tilde (~) in the URL. This usually indicates a personal site. 3. pubweb refers to a public server, which means people can access it from all over, usually means that it's a personal page. 4. Other clues for you to be aware of... use of the words users, people or members normally tell us that the site is actually for personal use.

As you finished this work, your assignment is to answer the questions posed in this sheet - when you're finished, you can email it to Mr. Johnson at Guy.Johnson@k12.sd.us. It's due at the end of the class period.