Internet verification vital for students
THE Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics ( STEM)- inspired technological revolution sweeping across the educational sector demands students to have requisite digital skills if the are to benefit fully.
Long ago the teacher and textbooks used to be the sources of knowledge but with the advent of internet Google is one word that has become popular in learning circles. Information is now on finger tips.
The benefits of researching on internet are plenty and so are the dangers as there is no regulating body that monitors reliability of what is on the Internet. Please do not take everything that you see on internet as the gospel truth. Students who are accustomed to doing research in libraries face new issues when they start doing research on the internet.
The worldwide web offers information and data from all over the world. It is necessary to develop skills to evaluate what you find. When you use a research or academic library, the books, journals and other resources have already been evaluated by scholars, publishers and librarians.
Every resource you find has been evaluated in one way or another before you ever see it. When you are using the world wide web, none of this applies.
There are no filters. Because anyone can write a web page, documents of the widest range of quality, written by authors of the widest range of authority, are available on an even playing field. Excellent resources reside alongside the most dubious. Beware and be careful.
There are several factors you have to consider before you use the information. You can use filters such as authorship, publishing body, point of view or bias, referral to other sources, verifiability, currency. This will help you to distinguish between propaganda, misinformation and disinformation. This mostly happens in controversial subjects. History is the most affected as writers tend to be nationalistic. A case in point is the Israeli–Palestine conflict. In science the origins of HIV AIDS still spark a ball of controversy.
Perhaps the major criterion used in evaluating information is the question who wrote this? When we look for information with some type of critical value, we want to know the basis of the authority with which the author speaks.
In your own field of study, the author is a well-known and well-regarded name you recognise. The Web/internet document you are reading gives biographical information, including the author’s position, institutional affiliation and address.
The publishing body also helps evaluate any kind of document you may be reading. In the print universe, this generally means that the author’s manuscript has undergone screening in order to verify that it meets the standards or aims of the organization that serves as publisher. This may include peer review. On the internet, ask the following questions to assess the role and authority of the “publisher”, which in this case means the server (computer) where the document lives. Is the name of any organisation given on the document you are reading? Are there headers, footers, or a distinctive watermark that show the document to be part of an official academic or scholarly web site?
Point of view or bias reminds us that information is rarely neutral. Because data is used in selective ways to form information, it generally represents a point of view. Every writer wants to prove his or her point, and will use the data and information that assists him in doing so. When evaluating information found on the internet, it is important to examine who is providing the information you are viewing, and what might be their point of view or bias. The popularity of the Internet makes it the perfect venue for commercial and socio-political publishing. For example if the page is presented by a tobacco company consortium, you should be suspicious of its reports on the addictiveness of nicotine.
Then comes the issue of timeliness. In printed documents, the date of publication is important. Finally, remember that even though a page might not meet your standards as a citable source, it may help you generate good ideas or point to other usable sources. Also, be sure not to stop your search at the first page you find, shop around and do some comparison so that you can have points of reference.