Finding good information on the internet

By Kevin McCluney | Jul 16, 2011 09:00 AM | 16

 

"Have you heard about the highly endangered tree octopus of the forests of the Pacific Northwest? "Ridiculous," you say? But I found a whole webpage devoted to saving them, so they must exist, right? This website has been used to intentionally mislead students as part of a scientific study, and it points out a real problem our society faces in the digital information age: anyone can put anything on the internet.[Ed. this sentence edited for clarification]"

Finding good information on the internet
The internet empowers us to educate ourselves and make more informed choices and decisions without leaving our couches. But if we believe everything we find on the internet, we are likely to wind up making some very poor decisions. In this new digital information age, how do we keep from being misinformed? As a skeptical environmental research scientist and educator I have picked up a few tricks that anyone can use to find and select high-quality information from the internet.
#1 Don’t be scared of scientific papers
#2 Not all websites are created equal
#3 Checking the facts

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