4.13. Now read Text C and check your ideas.

(To understand the text better use the vocabulary given below.)

TEXT C

Thinking about What We've Found

The fact is that students increasingly depend on the Internet for information, so it's important that they develop ways to evaluate their findings. Zack could have used some, or all, of the following techniques to decide whether the site was a reliable source for information.

Purpose

Try to determine a Web site's purpose. What is it trying to do? Why was it created? Most Web sites are designed to sell services and products, present information, put ideas forward, or entertain. Many sites do several of these at once.

A Web site's purpose will not always be clear. Look at Butz's site. His purpose is surely advocacy, although he comes across as an objective information provider, especially in the closing sentence of his article: "Surely any thoughtful person must be skeptical." Would a 14-year-old know how to distinguish between objective information and propaganda?

Understand the purpose(s) of a Web site, and that those purpose(s) may not be entirely obvious.

Author

The next step in validation involves the site's author. We all know that it's easy to fool people. Many people will believe someone if he or she sounds authoritative. Butz is a professor, sure, but he's an Engineering professor. How does that qualify him to speak as an expert on the Holocaust? It

doesn't. But people see "Professor" and take what he says seriously.

Zack didn't know anything about Butz, but could have researched his background. If Zack ran a search for "Arthur Butz," on the search engine Google, he would find Butz's name on a page titled "Holocaust Deniers" at the Web site for the anti-hate organization HateWatch (http://www.splcenter.org/intel/hatewatch/). Similarly, Zack would find Butz's article at a second hate directory site listed under "A Guide to Hate Groups on the Internet: Hate Books, Newsletters and Articles". Zack would find Butz mentioned negatively in a March 1998 USA Today article titled, "College anti-

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Semitism on the rise, according to new report." Zack would also find Butz's book described as popular among "anti-Semites" in a review of Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust.

If Zack had run this multi-search on Butz, he would have seen how other people categorize Butz' work.

Establish the credibility of the author.

Meta-Web Information

Meta-Web information validates Web pages solely within the context of other Web pages.

Let's start with the URL, or address, of a Web page. You need to know when they're accessing a personal home page. Most Internet Service Providers give their subscribers a few megabytes of free space on a Web server to use as they want.

Here are two sample URLs: <http://www.cdsinet.net/users/bartlett> and <http://www.icon-stl.net/~stefan/>. An experienced Web user knows that both URLs point to personal home pages.

In the first example, the word "users" is the user name of someone who accesses the Internet through cdsinet.net. In the second example, focus on the ~. A tilde (~) indicates a Web site that has been created by someone given space on a Web server. "stefan" is the user name of someone who accesses the Internet through icon-stl.net.

Knowing the above, if Zack had looked at Butz's URL - <http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/index.html> – he'd have seen the ~, an indicator that this is a personal Web site.

Just as Zack can know something about individuals by their clothing, he can learn about a Web site by looking at its URL. Clothing tells us a lot, but the company a person keeps tells us more. Learning how a Web page interacts within the network of all other Web sites is valuable information.

Meta-information sources.

It is always a good idea to look beyond the Internet for sources of authentic information.

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2)достоверный, верный

4.14.Translate the text into English and then finish it. Use the vocabulary from the Texts B,C.

Все большее количество студентов используют Интернет как и с- точник информации для своих исследований. Сегодня в Интернете можно найти доказательства любых идей, которые могут прийти вам в голову. А ведь многие считают ту информацию, которая представлена в Интернете вполне достоверной. Но это не так. Поэтому очень важно научиться оценивать достоверность такой информации. Для того чтобы определить является ли сайт надежным источником информации, можно использовать несколько методов: ___________

4.15.Write a list of recommendations to help students critically evaluate the reliability of a Web site.

4.16.Do the crossword.

1.Electronic messages sent to someone over the Internet.

2.Copy information from a web site to your own computer.

3.The place on the Internet where a company/organization/etc stores its documents.

4.A system linking millions of documents stored on Internet computers around the world.

5.Move form one document or web site to another, to find information.

6.Text, image or button that connects to other destination on the web.

7.A device that makes connecting to the Internet possible.

8.A group of computers joined together.

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9. Now provide your own definition.

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