Overview:

When it comes to the Internet, it seems kids, or for that matter adults, will believe anything. A day does not go by when we find that people have forwarded us a plausible story on a missing girl names Ashley Flores, flour as an effective burn remedy, or that bananas will be extinct in 10 years.

Again, if it's on the Internet, it's true for many people, especially our students. You would think that something as absurd as an octopus that lives in a tree might be enough to cast some doubts in the minds of our students - it wasn't.

A creature concocted in a research 'laboratory' has exposed shocking Internet illiteracy among students, with a leading expert warning it could mean a learning crisis in schools.

Donald Leu, a researcher from the University of Connecticut, conducted a study among the Facebook generation of students - deemed 'digital natives' due to their online savviness - to try to prove they will believe anything they read on the internet.

He directed students to the website http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus, where they found details about the fabricated endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus in order to test students’ ability to evaluate information they find online. It detailed the creature's appearance and habits, including how it uses its suckers to move along tree branches in a form of 'locomotion' and steals eggs from the nests of birds. It even claimed that it was endangered mainly due to the penchant of wealthy 'fashionistas' to use the tree octopuses as ornamental hat decorations.

The students not only believed all of the fabricated information, but also insisted on the existence of the octopus, even when researchers explained all the information had been made up. Mr Leu, founder and director of the New Literacies Research Lab at the university, warned that students were unable to discern between fact and fiction online and said this would lead them to graduate without the proper thinking skills needed to meet college and workforce demands. He said: 'Most students simply have very little in the way of critical evaluation skills.

Assignment:

To get develop a critical eye and mind when looking at a website, we would like you to use a website evaluation form (PDF) developed by Kathy Schrock or this online Evaluation Wizard from the 21st Century Information Fluency project -  Use the form to evaluate the following sites:

Dog Island
DHMO - http://www.dhmo.org/
All About Explorers 

Then, create a post in the critical evaluation process forum about what you have learned through the evaluation process:

• Do you think your students are skilled at Internet search?
• What about your fellow educators? Why do you think that?
• What could educators do to help improve a key 21st Century literacy?