Reconsidering the Checklist in Teaching Internet Source Evaluation

The growing importance of the Internet in our society requires that university graduates be skilled in critical evaluation of the messages and sources present in the online world. Traditional efforts to teach these skills have relied on specific, checklist-like tools; recently, these approaches have rightly come under criticism for being ill-suited to authentic, modern Internet tasks. This article proposes that such specific tools still have a place, however, and suggests a new version of such a tool that better addresses a changing Internet and the evolving ways we use this medium for information-seeking tasks.