Corroboration With Others To Help You To Write A Good Article

By Author: Amandda
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The next strategy I showed my students became one of the most important strategies we discussed: corroborating information we find with other trusted sources. When I presented the concept of corroboration, I first talked about using common sense. If something we encounter on the Internet sounds too Cartier Roadster Replica good or too odd to be true, then it most likely is; or, if information we encounter online does not seem to match what we already know, it is likely suspect. Sometimes all we have to do is pause and think a bit about what we're reading—too often the students would simply accept as truth anything they saw on a Web page without taking a minute to consider what they were reading.

However, sometimes our knowledge or common sense is not strong enough to make a judgment; in these cases, the ease of access to information pro-vided by the Internet is a wonderful tool. For instance, a Google search for the keywords "tree octopus" allowed students to find other sites that exposed the truth about the fictitious animal. ...
... Many sites in the search results we found were teacher sites that discussed how to use the "Tree Octopus" site to teach students about bogus information online—a real clue to us that the site's validity was questionable. Another link in the search results led to Wikipedia, where we read that the tree octopus is a hoax. In fact, students have informed me that they often prefer to visit Wikipedia before going anywhere else online because it's easy to do so and they trust the site. Given Wikipedia's controversial history in academic circles, as teachers we should also encourage students to corroborate what they find there with more trusted encyclopedic sites such as Encarta or Encyclopedia Britannica Online .

The biggest challenge with having students corroborate information they find is that doing so is more work than some of them are initially willing to do. As fast as Internet searches may seem for those of us raised on the red-covered Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, many students feel it takes too long to conduct additional searches to corroborate what they've read. However, a few demonstrations showed students that in reality it doesn't take long to find corroborating information. I also found that requiring students to write a simple defense Tag Heuer Replica Watches of any website they used in their research encouraged them to take the effort to corroborate information. As with so many things in teaching, setting high expectations for students and holding them accountable to those is important to their success.