In the lower grades, teachers can steer students toward reputable sites, and as students progress into middle school they should be trained to apply an ever more discerning eye. Still, the message of the New Literacies Lab experiment is: You can’t believe everything you read online, says McMackin, and this lesson should be taught early and often, certainly by the time students begin to do online research. The Web presents content through a variety of formats, rather than through the single format of the printed page. Learning content through the Internet is more of a discovery process, as they access materials to inform an understanding of the arts, history, politics, current events, and developments in health, science, and technology. The Internet has expanded children's opportunities beyond textbooks and encyclopedias, giving them access to primary source material that was once the sole province of specialists. “Students need content knowledge to know if a site is credible, and the Internet allows them to build that content knowledge more easily than they ever could in the past,” says Mary McMackin, former professor in the Language and Literacy programs, and now professor emerita. But building content knowledge and learning to navigate the Internet are inseparably linked in their minds. Educating Students to Discern Credible ContentĮxperts in the field of new literacies agree that students need guidance to gauge the veracity of online content. They argued that schools were producing kids who didn’t have a “broad base of knowledge about how the world works,” in the words of one Time blogger. The now classic University of Connecticut New Literacies Lab experiment not only prompted calls for stepping up efforts to teach online literacy (“new literacies” is the preferred term), but also triggered dismay among commentators who were already uneasy with the increased role of the Internet in education.
A team of experts in reading comprehension from the University of Connecticut was using an Internet hoax website to test whether students could identify bogus online material. Of course, there’s no such thing as a tree octopus. New Literacies and Education: The Tree Octopus LegacyĮver heard of the Pacific Northwest tree octopus? Neither had a group of Connecticut seventh graders who, when presented with a convincing website detailing the habits of this extraordinary creature, concluded that the site was “credible” and that such an animal existed.
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