Taking the Stage

Sometimes the best way to learn to be a discerning viewer of others' work is to try to do some authoring-and manipulating-yourself. You can find some great suggestions at Yahooligans. After sharing information about Stalin and the ways in which he airbrushed photos to remove key people from the scene, the lesson challenges students to try their own photo manipulation. From there, students build to manipulating graphs and creating entirely bogus sites on a fictional topic of their own choosing.

If students end up creating and posting their own hoax sites online, you will want to talk to them about possible repercussions. Remind them that there's a good likelihood that their sites will show up as a search result for some unsuspecting Web surfer at some point in the future.

Suggest that they check out the following Web page: http://web.fvdes.com/teacher_resources/Web_Eval_TL/OKWine/Okawp.html. It is written by teacher John Goldsmith, who-to make a point about Web accuracy to students and fellow educators-created a hoax site on the wonders of the Oklahoma wine industry.

As you can deduce from his retraction page, he found himself in some hot water with a group of people he originally did not believe existed-the real Oklahoma vineyard owners.