Town School for Boys Library

According to Bobby Henderson, the creator of this very silly website, global warming is a “direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates” in the world. To support his tongue-in-cheek point, Henderson offers internet-users this graph:

Now, most sensible people realize that Henderson’s website is a spoof. Obviously, pirates have nothing to do with global warming. But it’s not always so easy to tell truth from fiction on websites.

For example, fifth-graders recently debated the reliability of a website calling for help in saving the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree octopus. The website offered what appeared to be very scientific information:

The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the Eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30-33 cm.

Looks pretty realistic, right? Lots of big vocab words, plenty of specific details. But wait a minute. Tree octopuses!? Really? Once the fifth-graders really started thinking about the information they were reading, they realized that it was all a big hoax. Of course there’s no such thing as a tree octopus! Octopuses live in the ocean, not in trees! On further examination, they discovered that the tree octopus website had no clear author and no clear date of publication — two big clues that it wasn’t a good info source.

The internet offers thousands of rich sources of information, but it is also home to plenty of misinformation. So how do we distinguish between good and bad web sources? Ask a Town School fifth-grader, and he’ll tell you about P.A.D., a quick trick for deciding whether a website is trustworthy or not. P.A.D. stands for Purpose, Author, Date. When doing internet research, you should always be sure that you can identify the website’s purpose (to inform, to persuade, to sell, to spoof), its author (AND whether that author is an expert in his or her subject), and the date that the information was written. If you can’t identify all three P.A.D. items, then you don’t have a good research site.

Give this technique a try. Can you P.A.D. the following websites? Leave us a comment and tell us what you think.

1) http://www.nineplanets.org/saturn.html

2) http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Saturn

3) http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/saturn/