Module 1. Information and data literacy. E-book
Practical exercise
Title: Evaluation of information and data
The exercise is about the evaluation of information and data on a certain given topic. For an educator, it is more difficult to transmit the assessment skill, than the searching and managing information and data since the reliability of the sources is tricky to detect, even for a more expert eye.
The exercise directly refers to the adult learner, and it follows the common 5-W questions used by the press.
You are given two links from your educator. Your job is to enter both of them and distinguish between fact and fake news, as a practice to be able to detect true and verified information from personal opinions.
What is really existing? A tree octopus or an octopus tree?
How to verify such information and cross-check the provided data?
Follow these steps:
Ask yourself where this information is coming from. Observe the URL. Does it look credible?
- You should acknowledge that verified URLs are ending with .org, .com, .edu, .net.
- Some fake URL sounds incomplete or similar to famous websites but with some different letter.
Check when the last update of the webpage has been made. Was that recent?
- Sometimes the dates do not even exist on the calendar, such as the 30th of February.
- Some information could be just old, and we cannot take it as still valid.
Search for who created that information. Any metadata that can help you understand it?
- Another type of media, such as pictures can help us understand whether the information is edited by a person or that has been artificially created for the purpose (think about artificial intelligence).
- Check if the publisher is somehow related to other better-known and trusted authors.
Analyse what the website is talking about, and the appearance it has. Does it look professional?
- Read carefully and highlight possible misspellings and grammar errors. In case you find some, the author definitely doesn’t write for a job, but he/she better expresses a personal opinion.
- Analyse the layout and the overall appearance of the web, and its sections: wrong information usually lies on impersonal webpages where no author claims the content, or strange names appear.
Think why that content has been delivered. Do you think that makes any logical sense?
- Remember that when it is too good to be true, maybe that information or data is simply not.
- Attempt to cross-check the information by researching the same content on more reliable sources.
Once you have answered all those questions, make your own conclusion, before sharing it with the group.
Definitely, a tree octopus sounds amazing and quite a scientific discovery, but the website that contains that information has a strange name, a cartoonish layout, and, overall, a set of illogical data, almost against nature. Moreover, there is no certain identity of the content author, and the images have a weird quality, which indicates a possible edition of the same.
On the contrary, the octopus tree information seems quite accurate, and the website is trustworthy for its appearance and layout. What is more, the images and the metadata provide the reader with specific information, which can be cross-checked and verified through other sources.