Are you information fluent?Are you web literate?

Do you know if the information you are reading on a webpage is authentic or

fictitious or just plan biased?

How can you tell?

Who wrote the website?

Who links to the website?

The answers to these questions are very important and we ALL clearly have a

responsibility to make sure that both we and our students know

these answers

Is the Information real – what are the dangers?

• Go to this website and read through the content briefly• Or go to Google and type Martin Luther King to get to this

(martinlutherking.org)• What do you think?

– What do you already know about Martin Luther King?– Do you think the information in this site is authentic? – Does it tell you anything about the Author?– Look at the URL – what do you think?– Confused? This is an easy one because you already

know about Martin Luther King – but what if you didn’t?

Who owns the site?

• How can we check the validity – the URL looks very official.

• Go to EasyWhois and type martinlutherking.org• This will show you that Stormfront own the site –

a white nationalist supremacist group• How would the students know that this

information is not valid?

Is seeing believing?

Counterfeit Sites

Parody and Spoof Sites –

peanut butter turned into diamonds

Hoaxes, Scams & Misinformation

http://www.dhmo.org/environment.html

DHMO or H2O

• Much of this information is true, but it is presented in such a way as to cause concern. Since duhydrogen monoxide is nothing but water you realise that this chemical is not so dangerous after all.

Fictitious Sites – Male Pregnancy

Questionable Sites – is Lip Balm Addictive

Hoaxes, Scams & Misinformation

Malicious Sites – racist and

scare-mongering

Product Sites – selling something, so unreliable information

Hoaxes, Scams & Misinformation

Phishing

Hoaxes, Scams & Misinformation –

trying to get personal information from you

This workshop is not about telling you how to deal with these

problems but we are trying to make you aware of their existence. We need to make sure that students

know about these sites and how to recognise them for what

they are.