Burden of Spoof
Bogus sites can help you teach information literacy
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 10/1/2000
Librarians keep telling me--and each other--the same things. Many students seem to actively avoid doing research in books, and want to do research only on the Net. Yet if you let them just go online to do research, the places they go tend to be not the kinds of places we librarians would consider the most trustworthy. Jinnie McDonnell, the K-8 library media specialist for the Wharton (NJ) Schools, says, "My seventh grade info tech students are not driven to find correct answers, lost as they are in the Zen of the Internet experience. They have to be badgered all the way." Lots of studies have shown us that kids need to be reminded constantly to verify the source of the information they use in homework assignments and research papers. Those of us who want to promote information literacy tear at our hair as we try to figure out a way to convince students that finding information you can trust is important. It's a lesson they'll need not only later in their educations, but also when they shop for a used car or invest in stocks one day. Students tend to blithely accept that everything they see online is correct. Perhaps the best way to show the value of trustworthy information is to show the students you serve information that's deliberately wrong. One of my favorite "false" sites is www.whitehouse.
Medicine and the sciences, of course, are areas that have always suffered a high level of quackery, and there is a long tradition of scientific parodies. One of the earliest online parodies of the academic scientific study
was the "Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches" page at www.sci.tamucc.edu/~pmichaud/toast/. Patrick Michaud of Texas A&M University created it in 1994, and page visitors can still see the time-lapse photos of the flames leaping out of Michaud's toaster in all of their colorful glory. Another funny site is "Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: An Effective, Low-Cost Solution to Combating Mind-Control" at zapatopi.net/afdb.html. Here you can learn how to protect your brain from electromagnetic mind-control rays by folding a beanie out of a five-foot sheet of aluminum foil (be sure, the site warns, to keep the shiny side out).
Then there's Ken Umbach's page about the threats to California's Velcro crop at members.unlimited.net/~kumbach/velcro.html. It's a funny pseudo-news story that reveals, among other things, that Velcro is a genetically engineered crop that grows in two strains: hooks and loops. There's also the fake promotional page for the
city of Mankato, MN, at www.lme.mankato.msus.edu/mankato/mankato.html that paints the city as a semi-tropical paradise. Just don't confuse this fictional Mankato with the real Mankato, home of Minnesota State University and the office of MSU's Dr. Don Descy, who is responsible for this and several other ersatz pages, put up to teach students lessons in site evaluation. The real Mankato's home page is at www.ci.mankato.mn.us/index.php3.
Try these pages out with middle and high school students and ask them: How can we be sure that what we find in a site is true? When should we look in other sources, like encyclopedias or periodicals, to verify things we read online? Why would people post things on the Internet that aren't true?
Helping students with these questions is our job; it's what libraries are for. Jinnie McDonnell told me that one day last year, two sixth-grade girls came into the library and asked her, "Mrs. McDonnell, is it all right if we use your library to think?" Of course.
