The problem with Google is that it does some things so well it is easy to see it as the primary tool of research.
The point of senior research is not in getting an answer....it's in getting the right answer!!
Students need to learn how to learn - how to access, analyse, and interpret the information they find - and how to distinguish authoritative from non-authoritative sources.
Students research from all these sources
Twitter: Who is the real Julia?
Date: When was the content created?
Find the mistake (using TinEye)
Assessing 'Breaking news' sites: Hoax or not?
University of Michigan website: Jacobo di Poggibonsi
Fake or Spoof examples - Phil Bradley
Self Publishing sites: Amazon Ebola books.
"In the past 90 days, some 84 people have
self-published Ebola e-books on Amazon,
almost half of them in the past month alone.
Many of them are popular, crawling their way
up the bestsellers’ list to sit atop categories...
And many of the books — almost all of them,
in fact — contain information that’s either
wildly misleading or flat-out wrong."
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Where does this fit into your History curriculum? In History, the information focus is about finding and using primary and secondary sources well to construct a historical narrative.
Inquiry in History
Questions to ask
Mandy Luptons Access article
2. R.E.A.L. test
Read the URL
Examine the sites content and history
Ask about the author or publisher
Look at the links in detail
http://www.webliteracy.edu.au/~hunter/tutorials/page1.html
Are you on a personal page? Look for a personal name, a tilde, %.
Wayback Machine will show the history of a website. Useful to check how up to date the information really is.
OR: try the BOM site. Check the frequency of the updates
Martin Luther King website (martinlutherking.org) use Easy Who-Is to find publisher of site.
Searching in a browser. Pages are arranged by PageRank, not by popularity or quality of information.
The search looks at the search terms and tries to compare with other content. When lots of pages have similar titles or content, it is the links that make a difference. Wikipedia almost always comes up at the top of a search not just because it is well known and popular, but also because there are so many sites that link to each Wikipedia page.
Test the links to a page by searching with link:(URL) in Google search bar.
Find the original source of an image: Tin Eye