More and more, students, including homeschoolers, are using the internet for research. However, just because something is on a website does not mean it’s credible, reliable, or even true. For a few dollars, anyone can put up a website up, saying anything they want about any subject.

Netcraft, an internet research firm, reported in January 2009, that there are nearly 188 million websites, with almost 75 million of them active! Let’s look at these big numbers from a different angle: if you were to spend one minute, 365 days, 24/7 on each active website, it would take you nearly 143 years to visit all of them! Whoa!!!

Okay… we have nearly 75 million active websites, who is responsible for evaluating the reliabilty and accuracy of online content? Simply put, you are. There are no “Internet Police” monitoring websites and their content.  It’s up to you, the internet user.

The question is, how do we teach our home educated kids to whether or not a website is a reliable and trustworthy internet resource?

Helpful tips to determine if a website is a reliable resource:

• Who is taking responsibility for the content?
  • Look for information about the site’s author, be it an individual or company.
  • Look for links that say “About us,” “About the Author”, “Who We Are,” etc.
  • Check the links to make sure they work. An “About Us” link that doesn’t work equals a red flag.
  • A site that lists an email address, but contains no information about the author,  is another red flag.

• What are the author’s credentials?
  • Is this person and/or company qualified to write the information?
  • Is the site presented an educational, informational, opinions, etc., site

• Look for indicators of quality information
  • Are references documented with footnotes or links to the original source?
  • Check the links; do they work?
  • Has the author has used the content within context of the original site
  • Are the linked-to sites themselves reliable resources?

• Check other resources, does the information agree? Most facts can be checked using multiple resources.

• Is the information current? Some websites contain information that was valid at one time, but is now outdated, making it irrelevant.

Wikipedia  – while we’re on the subject of finding reliable internet resources, I think a word about Wikipedia is in order. My grandson loves to look things up on Wikipedia, but I don’t allow him to use it as a reliable source for any of his homeschool research. Why? Wikipedia, a fairly new phenomenon, is an open-source free encyclopedia containing over 2 million articles. What this means is that anyone can write and/or edit anything about any subject. The author(s) don’t have to know diddly about what their subject is, much less have the credentials to be considered an expert on the topic.

From Wikipedia’s “About” page:

“Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world; anyone can edit it. … Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles…

Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute, since their primary role is to write articles that cover existing knowledge. This means that people of all ages and cultural and social backgrounds can write Wikipedia articles. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet….

Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which, in principle, anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation … Users need to be aware of this to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed…”

Wikipedia can be a fun place to visit, but it definitely doesn’t meet the criteria to be considered a reliable source of information.

If this information has been helpful and/or you can provide some additional tips on helping a homeschooler find reliable internet resources, I’d sure appreciate knowing!

In a future article, we’ll look at some ways you can keep your child safe online, especially as they approach the high school years.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Home Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.