Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information

We love the internet! It's a wealth of information where we can learn about just about anything, but it's also kind of a pit of information that can be false or misleading.

This time, John Green is teaching you how to fact-check like the pros. We're going to walk through the steps that professionals follow, including figuring out who is behind the information we read, why they're sharing that information, and what kind of evidence exists to back up the claim.

Look to your left. Look to your right. Look at this video. Today, John Green is going to teach you how to read laterally, using multiple tabs in your browser to look stuff up and fact check as you read. Real-time fact-checking can help you figure out what's real and what's not on the internet.

In which John Green teaches you how to assess the sources of information you find on the internet. The growing suspicion of expertise is a growing problem on the internet, and it can be very difficult to figure out which sources are authoritative.

Let's talk about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is often maligned by teachers and Twitter trolls alike as an unreliable source. And yes, it does sometimes have major errors and omissions, but Wikipedia is also the Internet's largest general reference work and as such an incredibly powerful tool.

Today we?re going to focus on how to tell good evidence from bad evidence and maybe importantly, how to identify ?Fine, but that doesn?t actually prove your point? evidence - the stuff that the Internet is built on.