This exercise moves beyond a “good/bad” binary or checklist approach to evaluating sources and instead asks students to consider the source in the context of its creation and the context of their need/use. Provide students with links to two or three sources based upon a topic you are covering in class. These should be a range of sources -- including a scholarly source, a popular source, a blog post or tweet, etc. Working in pairs, have students identify the source type and consider the usefulness for the purposes of the class project (paper, presentation, etc.) using the questions below to guide their reflection. During the debrief, students should report back their findings and how they think a source may provide useful for the given purpose. The instructor may need to clarify what a peer-reviewed source is, how a tweet could be used as a primary source, etc.
Questions for activity:
A jigsaw activity is a cooperative learning technique in which students are depend upon each other to learn material. This exercise could be modified to work either in person or asynchronously online. Divide students into small groups. Provide each group with a single source. Although each group will have its own source, they should all be related to a single research topic, similar to ones your students may select for projects/papers. Ask the group to apply SIFT to the source and consider if the sources are credible. Why or why not? Is it something you might use in your academic writing?
Students can report on their individual groups' decision. The class should discuss the overall findings and identify what the next steps would be if they had gathered this collection of sources. What sources would be worth digging into more deeply? If some sources were unreliable, how and where could they do their search again, knowing what they know now? Are there certain things they would look for?
If you're short on time or have a small class, you could ask for students to apply SIFT to a single source.
Rather than providing sources for your students, introduce them to SIFT and ask them to apply it to a news or social issue article found on their own social media feeds. This could be completed as an assignment in Moodle.
Class discussion could include what they found in general from their social media feeds. Were there articles that were misleading or entirely inaccurate? Were they surprised by what they learned in the process? Were there things they thought were true that weren't? They should be prepared to share the article in class.
Length: 4 minutes
Created by North Carolina State University Libraries. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
Length: 5 minutes
Created by NC State University Libraries. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.
Length: 3 minutes
Created by NC State University Libraries. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.
Length: Playlist of 4 videos (each 2-4 mins.) can be used separately or together.
Supplementary Materials: Andrea Baer and Daniel Kipnis at Rowan University have developed a detailed guide on evaluating online information using SIFT, including evaluation exercises and more detail on evaluating images and media.
Created by Newswise.ca with support from CIVIX, the Canadian Journalism Foundation, and the Google.org Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation.
This video introduces the concept of filter bubbles and the ways social media and internet search tools influence the information we encounter. This talk was originally recorded in 2011, but many of the concepts still apply to the ways we interact with information online.
Length: 9 minutes
TED Talk delivered by Eli Parsier.