Madeleine Sorapure, Pamela Inglesby, and George Yatchisin
“Web Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for Research in a New Medium”

Abstract by Samantha Reinhart Mora



This article discusses an important and interesting question– how do we go about teaching our students to do research on the complicated medium that is the Internet? Teachers today cannot ignore the web as a powerful resource for student researchers. However, students must be taught how to assess the complex variety of digital rhetorical situations and how to navigate the medium they are presented in. This helps students determine the reliability of the website as well as to extend important literacy skills, such as associative logic, and understanding visual rhetoric and interactivity. We need to guide students to become discerning readers of the internet who are able to discern the dangers while reaping the benefits of the web. The two major challenges posed by the Web as an information resource– diverse and unfiltered content and its hypermedia format- offer opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking and research skills.

There are some guides that are useful to some extent when evaluating Web sites. Based on librarian and teacher suggestions, these guides direct the student to assess the author and the publisher of the material. These criteria can be useful when, say, deciding which movie reviews are academic enough to include as sources. However, sometimes this method can cause students to reject potentially valuable material because the source seems unreliable when judged by traditional research methods.

Some research librarians, recognizing this, say that new techniques need to be developed because of (among other things) the difficulty of in identifying authors, the lack of peer review, and the unclear use of dates. There are also new genres of research to be considered: among them, personal home pages and infommerical Web sites.

Personal home pages offer fascinating first-person views that are potentially rich research sources, though students need to understand the difference between primary and secondary sources and how to evaluate the author for validity.

Infomercial sites pose an interesting problem, because although they are often commercial sites, their purpose is sometimes also to educate. Students must learn to evaluate the site on its own merits, conduct further research into the credentials of the author (sometimes as easy as Googling the author’s name) and to seek sources that make an opposing argument to balance informations sources. This creates some new kinds of work for the researcher, but also teaches solid critical and intellectual skills necessary for good research writing.

Students must learn another skill to determine validity of a site- how to read visual elements. These elements can complement, complicate, or contradict the message conveyed by the text.
“Websites teach us how they want to be read, in large part through visual, graphic, and layout elements, and we must be aware of that teaching process as we read.” Images can convey possible bias, while presenting a false objectivity on websites. Students need to be made aware how visual information can be manipulated.

Links can also provide valuable clues about the value of information on a site. An important aspect of evaluation is assessing the sources to which an author refers. Students must evaluate the number of links or the lack thereof, also understanding that often times academics are light on the links but heavy on references. Another issue with links deals with a source’s borders. We can look to George Landow’s rules for how a site must properly treat its visitors, which basically states that a site should always let a reader know where they are on the web… (If a link leads away from the site, the reader should know, and feel at home in the new document after using a link.) Links can be a means for stimulating and engaging readers, and can compel students to attend to structure and organizations.

Another facet to reflect upon is the interactivity of a Web site, as this can help indicate the quality, accuracy, bias, and the overall value of the information it presents. What kind of material is the website asking from the student, and how what does this show us about the reliability of the Web site? Students must learn to read interactive elements as clues in determining a Web site’s rhetorical mode and purpose.

In conclusion, although we should not forget that the Internet is not an ideologically neutral territory, it is important for students to be able to be critical users of the Internet– this can enhance student’ research and writing skills, and someday can even improve the
Web itself, as today’s researchers become tomorrow’s publishers.

Comments

I agree with the authors who pose that learning how to assess a website’s validity teaches the student valuable critical thinking skills. I would go even further and say that it is our duty as writing and reading teachers to teach students how to assess a website on many levels. As digital literacies continue to proliferate, we owe it to our students to teach them this new, intricate literacy. As the article concludes, the students today are the publishers of tomorrow, so by teaching our students these crucial literacies, we are working to make the Internet a better place!