The findingDulcinea Blog

A Search Engine for Educators

Three years ago, we introduced SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students. It is a bold concept – a human curated search engine that searches only Web sites that have been evaluated by research experts. We didn’t apply an algorithm or a filter – we created a whitelist of 35,000 Websites. Reviewers have uniformly praised SweetSearch as an outstanding tool for students.

After we launched, we learned of another group of people that may actually appreciate SweetSearch even more – educators. We continually monitor Twitter and education list serves to learn about the specific search needs of educators, and to make sure we meet those needs. The response has been gratifying:

 

See many more Tweets by educators about SweetSearch.

Teachers are learning that if they search in our reliable universe of sites, they can quickly build their lesson plans, find blogs and advice from fellow educators, and discover primary resources, which are hard to locate using the internal search function of sites such as The Library of Congress or National Archives.

To see typical results for yourself, take a look at the results for these representative terms, then compare them to the results of Google and Bing:

Holocaust

Differentiated Instruction

War of 1812

Shakespeare Sonnets

World War II

 You'll likely find, as Paul Gilster, a technology journalist, wrote in the News Observer about SweetSearch: “Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality....I was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials.”

SweetSearch has integrated Yolink, a tool that highlights keywords, showing where the term is used and in what context, so that anyone can quickly scan a search results page and easily determine which results will be most helpful for a particular task. See how quickly you can evaluate the full first page of 20 results! The search terms and surrounding context can then be saved, with one click, to a Google Doc (with the link included), EasyBib's citation generator, or a social bookmarking service. So you not only can find what you’re looking for in seconds, but you can be sharing it with colleagues moments later.

For Open Education Resource platforms to succeed, they need to be as easy for educators to use as possible. It's not enough to give educators a long, aggregated list of relevant resources of varying quality; the resources need to be expertly curated, and there must be a function for educators to search within these resources.

That is what SweetSearch provides, at no cost.

 

  

 

 

Mark Moran

CEO

21st Century Activities for Women's History Month

This week, I scoured the Web for lesson plans and activities for Women's History Month. Few, if any, asked students to do Web research, demonstrate media literacy, synthesize multiple resources, communicate their findings in a manner that engages modern audiences, or share their project outside the walls of their school.

Below I suggest a few activities that will help students learn about inspiring women and seminal events in women's history, and also offer a learning experience that is relevant to the world in which they live and will one day seek to work. At the end of the post, we list our free resources to assist students in their work, and discuss an opportunity for students to publish their work.

Create a Timeline on Life.com

Life.com offers an extensive collection of photos from Life Magazine's legendary archives, as well as from Getty Images. It enables users to create and share a timeline of photos they select, and to write a caption for each photo. Here are four sample timelines about women in history. Caution: some of the photos on Life.com have adult themes, or may depict gore or violence.

Research Women's Firsts in 2010

History is not only what happened long ago; it is made every day. Two years ago, we partnered with The Women on the Web on "2008 Firsts for Women," a collection of women from all over the world who became the first of their gender to achieve something significant in 2008. One example was Brittany Cantazaro, who at the age of 19, had become New York Waterway’s first female ferry captain. Only a week after we published her profile, Brittany piloted the first ferry to rescue passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 after Captain Sullenberger landed it in the Hudson River. She exhibited wisdom beyond her years by cutting the engines of the ferry to avoid creating a wake that could have sent the plane's passengers plunging into the chilly water.

Have a team of students research and create "2010 Firsts for Women." In learning about women who are breaking barriers today, students will ponder why this is so, and gain a greater appreciation for those woman who broke barriers so many years ago.

A research tip: databases, which allow for more precise date targeting than any search engine, will be indispensible for identifying 2010's firsts for women.

Write a Series of Articles with a Common Theme, or Add to One of Ours

We've created a number of series of articles about women around a common theme:

• When we learned about Ada Lovelace, who created one of the world's first computer programs, we created a series of 6 Unsung Women who never got fair credit for their brilliant ideas, heroic deeds or extraordinary work, often due to prejudice, discrimination or the social mores of their time.
• Women who found their calling later in life often have the most unexpectedly inspiring stories. Last year, we again teamed with The Women on the Web to profile Late Bloomers, a handful of women who came into their own later in life, demonstrating the power of perseverance and the value of experience.
• In Women Who Dared, we recognized 15 women whose actions—in courtrooms, on buses, in polling booths and in planes—shattered the status quo. Through guts, grit and unyielding perseverance these women made a difference, raising our expectations for ourselves, our daughters, and our granddaughters.
• In Women of Honor: Writers Who Won’t Be Silenced, we honored five dissident writers whose lives and struggles enlighten and inspire us. One of the writers, Iryna Khalip, has since been arrested in Belarus and charged with criminal acts for speaking out against the government.

A class of students could develop a series of articles around their own theme, or write articles to add to one of our series.

On This Day Challenge

A student (or group of students) chooses a significant event from women's  history and uses the Web to research and gather information on the chosen event. Using critical thinking and analysis skills, the student then writes an article on the event, citing the Web sources. We provide specific instruction on how to write an On This Day article, and offer a dozen examples of events from women's history on this page.

Create Videos or Slideshows Instead of Articles

To create a video portrait of a woman or series of women, students could use a screen capture software product, such as Camtasia, to capture text, images and excerpts of videos of the women profiled, or a product such as Animoto to create a narrated video slideshow. Both products' websites offer extensive tutorials. In each case, students must conduct Web research, and then assemble the images, write a script, and create the end-product. The students' work could be displayed on a school website or their own blogs, or Teacher Tube or YouTube, and thus reach audiences across the globe.

Resources

To support students, we offer these resources:

• SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students,
• Ten Steps to Better Web Research,
• How to Avoid Plagiarism by Paraphrasing Correctly, and
• How to Synthesize Multiple Resources into an Article.

Opportunity for Students to Get Published

In the 21st century, everyone is a publisher. Students must learn to create work that is seen outside the walls of their school building. We'll happily publish on findingDulcinea any student work that you submit to us that links to excellent online resources and is well-written for the student's grade level. Alternatively, we'll publish a series of blog posts throughout the month that highlight and link to student projects on school or student Websites. Note also that the On This Day Challenge, discussed above, offers a more formal opportunity for students to get published and win prizes.

 

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In conjunction with findingEducation, we've launched the On This Day Challenge. We're asking students to write articles about historic events by conducting online research, with chances to win gift cards and cash and have their work published on findingDulcinea.

Click here to read everything teachers need to know about getting involved in the project. You'll find a section on motivating students to participate, advice for writing and researching an On This Day article, tips for evaluating Web sites, an FAQ and more.

Why SweetSearch's Results Are Much Better Than Those of Blekko

We warmly welcome a new entrant to the field of human-curated search - Blekko. It has gotten a trove of publicity from its formal launch today, with articles on the Websites of WSJ, NYT, Wired.com, The Next Web, the Atlantic, and many others.

You might not expect us to welcome a new "competitor," but that would be narrow-minded. The only "competitor" we worry about is the status quo. The vast majority of search users use Google only, and either don't know or don't care that the search results often do a poor job of providing them with the information they need. So we welcome the attention a new entrant brings to this issue. We also know that the search market is so vast that one more entrant won't be a barrier to our eventual success, in light of the significant inroads we've already made, particularly in education.

Blekko also doesn't worry us because we've compared its results to those of SweetSearch, and, just as we concluded in a head-on comparison to Google and Bing, we found that SweetSearch's results are far superior to those of Blekko for research-oriented queries. This includes not only the types of searches made by students and teachers, but anyone who is trying to get a comprehensive view of an issue.

To be clear about one important point: in Ten Steps to Better Web Research, we urge users to learn "the full toolkit" of search options. We note that not even we use SweetSearch 100% of the time. There are instances in which Google, Bing, and surely Blekko will provide better search results. Think of these tools as complementary, not competitive, to one another, and use more than one on every serious research inquiry. Indeed, SweetSearch offers a "toggle button" to help you easily compare Google's results.

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea's 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated as credible by our research experts and librarian and teacher consultants. For emerging learners, we've recently introduced a beta version of SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently ranks high quality Websites created for elementary school students, and mixes them with accessible primary source sites.

We constantly evaluate our search results and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and universities. We do more than merely exclude spam sites; we also exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not cite worthy; many of these show up in Blekko.

For a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch, see our media kit; to add SweetSearch to the search options on your Web browsers, click on the "Add On" box on SweetSearch; or get a widget for SweetSearch, to  embed it on your Web site.

 

Enough of the "press release."  We'll compare the results for Sweet Search and Blekko for George Washington, Diabetes Complications, and Comet Hartley, the green comet that is currently making a close pass of the earth. I did not use quotation marks, since most search users don't.

For George Washington, Blekko returns 19 results on the first page; the first six include the homepage of George Washington University, the Wikipedia entry, the entry in IMDB about a movie that has no connection to the first U.S. president, a silly YouTube video, and user-generated content from Answers.com. A total of four of the 19 results provide credible information about the first president of the United States. Using a Blekko-suggested slash-tag, such as history, improves the quality and relevance of the results, but turns up very narrow entries about specific aspects of George Washington's life, not the broad overview someone searching his name would expect.

Now let's analyze the SweetSearch results. SweetSearch always displays two sets of search results - first, up to three results from findingDulcinea, and secondly, from the full index of 35,000 sites. This search produces stellar results from findingDulcinea, including a blog entry that discusses why George Washington has two birthdays, and a short profile that links to seven of the most outstanding Web resources about him, including a biography published in 1807, which you won't easily find using any other search engine. The "natural" results add his profile on Whitehouse.gov and C-Span's American Presidents, the documents collections of the Miller Center and the Library of Congress, entries from the LOC student site and other student-friendly sites, and a few recent news stories.

The results from Blekko for diabetes complications are all high-quality. Interviews with its founder indicate that Blekko searches only a universe of 150 Web sites for health queries. Ironically, we find this is too few; the results, while all credible, appear to be largely redundant. We estimate that SweetSearch indexes 1,000 health-focused Websites, and also searches the health content on thousands of mainstream media Websites, which complement the information provided by the health-focused sites. Thus, its natural search results for diabetes complications includes results from medical journals and news publications, as well as the outstanding blog "DLife," which collectively provide a more rounded view than the narrow results on Blekko. The findingDulcinea results all come from our Web Guide to Diabetes, and include four well-curated, synergistic links in the context of a narrated, organized guide that was created by a registered nurse and checked by an editor and quality assurance guru.

Of the first 20 results on Blekko for Comet Hartley, roughly six are well-written "passion sites," created by an individual who is passionate about the subject, but does not disclose any academic or journalistic credentials; these sites are fine if you are knowledgable about the subject, but otherwise you don't know whether you can trust the content. Additionally, seven of the 20 results are identical re-posts of NASA's press release that it is sending a spacecraft to rendezvous with the comet.

On SweetSearch, you find mostly outstanding results from credible resources, such as Sky and Telescope Magazine, EarthSky (created by top scientists), NASA, HubbleSite, Phys.org, and several news publications.

Please let us know what you think of Sweet Search! Write us at sweetsearch@DulcineaMeda.com

 

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

Materials for Presentation at LISMA, Sept 29, 2010

I'm presenting today at the first meeting of the school year of the Long Island School Media Association, at Garden City High School, at 4 p.m..

Here are links to all of the materials that I will be presenting; I provide full contact info at the end.  

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

One part of my presentation is a discussion of the free products offered by Dulcinea Media. These are discussed comprehensively in these two blog posts:

9 Ways We Help Educators Teach Students How to Use the Web

How We Help Social Studies Teachers Integrate the Web into the Syllabus

The second post repeats a fair bit of the first, but adds specific insight into our content for social studies teachers.

These two posts above themselves link to just about everything else I'd want you to read about our company, but for your convenience, I repeat some of the most important and relevant links below:

Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students

Transforming Web Research for Students

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

            Click here for widgets for SweetSearch and our other products.

Educators Will Create the Replacement for Textbooks

EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET IN SCHOOL

This presentation is a PowerPoint that I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare. The links contained in it can be opened by clicking on the slide page, and are repeated below for your convenience.

Things that Keep Us Up at Night

Younger Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

Angela Maiers: Learning Now

A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto

It's Broken, Let's Fix it: the Traditional Model of School Librarianship

Dalton Sherman, Dallas ISD

SweetSearch School Librarians

TEACHING TEN STEPS TO BETTER WEB RESEARCH

The presentation on "Teaching Ten Steps to Better Web Research" is a PowerPoint that I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare. The links contained in it can be opened by clicking on the slide page.

CONTACT INFO

Do not hesitate to contact me at Mark [dot] Moran [at] DulcineaMedia [dot] com or call me at (917) 597-3815 with any questions.

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

"Like" SweetSearch on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

How We Help Social Studies Teachers Integrate the Web into the Syllabus

The Web contains millions of primary source documents, such as letters, diaries, photographs and videos, and contemporary news accounts. It also contains innumerable reflective essays written by experts who are much more conversant with the topic than a general writer for a textbook publisher.

But few educators have the time to sorting through literally billions of Web sites to find the rare gems that lend students a greater understanding of a subject. Traditional search engines aren't helpful; they sort by relevance, not by credibility, and often can't filter finely enough to help you find what you're looking for.

What you need is expert human curators to highlight the material worth your consideration.

Click here to read reviews of our work by well-known educators and journals.

Our landing page for Social Studies reflects the effort of two dozen full-time researchers and an equal number of teacher consultants who have brought order to the best social studies content available online.

Begin each day by perusing our SweetSearch2Day, which is a daily curated assortment of the best content on the Web for current events, history, language arts, science, culture and other topics. Better yet, sign-up for our newsletter, and at 6:00 a.m. NY time, we'll send you links to the most intriguing content on that day's page. For examples of the newsletter, click here and here.

Our seminal article, "101 Great Sites for Social Studies Class," points you to gems such as:

• Rag Linen, which contains copies of original newspapers from the 18th century, including accounts of the French & Indian War;
• The Mike Wallace Interview, a collection of 66 interviews from the 1950s with luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Pearl Buck and Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Harp Week, which examines presidential elections, the Civil War, Reconstruction and other events of 19th century America through the articles and cartoons of Harper’s Weekly.

To provide a practical use for the many interview sites we've uncovered, we publish "Interview of the Day," which leads you to some of the most compelling video, audio and text interviews of the 20th century. Do you teach your students about Amelia Earhart? We found three newsreel interviews with her from 1928. How about Eleanor Roosevelt? Watch the interview she gave to Mike Wallace in 1957, in which she remarked about The Cold War, "I feel quite sure that the American people, if they have knowledge and leadership, can meet any crisis just as well as they met it over and over again in the past.”

The On This Day articles that we publish each day explain an historical event, what led up to it, what happened that day, and the long-term recriminations and echoes in history. We also publish it in Spanish, as Hoy en la Historia. We hope you'll encourage your students to elevate their research and critical thinking skills in our On This Day Challenge, which offers them step-by-step instruction, prizes, and a chance to be published.

Students need role models, right? We've written thousands of headline articles; high school librarian Joyce Valenza wrote on her School Library Journal blog that our "discoveries are  timely and seem to continually attack those topics my students research." We find additional background or reference information on the topic, related topics and opposing points of view. We integrate all this information into a cohesive, comprehensive look at the topic, and link to our sources, which we align in a single box.

When Iran violently suppressed protests last year, we wrote about the History of Iranian Revolutions. When a killer whale tragically drowned a Sea World trainer, leading to calls for its release into the wild, our article about it summarized and linked to a PBS documentary that provided a chart discussing all 133 killer whales that had ever been captured in the wild for use in shows, and an intriguing story about killer whales who cooperated with Pacific Island villagers to trap, kill and mutually share other whales. For other examples of how we help social studies teachers teach students to think for themselves about what we call the "fragile truth of history," read this blog post.

A white paper released in November 2010 by Temple University Media Education Professor Renee Hobbs, sponsored by The Knight Commission, included Beyond the Headlines in its "Portraits of Success: Powerful Voices for Kids" and wrote, "Finding Dulcinea... addresses the 'context deficit' that occurs with online searching."

Our Features section contains a wide range of articles of interest to educators. For example, we hear often that students struggle to find good material for country and state reports. So we published "Sites for Learning About Countries," which links to the best 18 sites we found, for younger and older learners, as well as "Sites for Learning About the 50 States." We also know that students often study inventors and inventions; our Innovations series discusses, and provides outstanding research resources about, the complex history behind the inventions of modern mainstays such as the bicycle, refrigerator, vacuum and autopsies.

Because our content is so vast and voluminous, we've created special collections pages. Teachers often tell us that students all want to write about the same events and people, year after year; Jackie and Rosa for African-American History Month; Eleanor, Florence, Betsy and Oprah for Women's History Month; Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa for Global Studies. SweetSearch Biographies is an indexed collection of more than 1,000 biographies, sortable by profession, gender, and race/origin. Students using this will soon be teaching you about people you've never heard of. After a librarian told us that students all write about the same events and people from the Holocaust, we created this collection of Holocaust material as the antidote.

Our thousands of articles build upon the dozens of Web Guides you'll find in the left-hand column on the social studies landing page. Nearly all were created by outstanding teachers of the subject/grade level covered. The guides are comprehensive, narrated tours of the best content on the Web for teachers, students and parents, and directly link you to the best primary sources about a subject. The guides typically track the teacher writer's syllabus.

Overlaying it all is SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students. It only searches 35,000 credible resources that our research experts and educator consultants have approved when creating all the content discussed above. We also spend our Saturdays trolling through lists of sites recommended by social studies educators, vetting them ourselves, and adding those that pass muster. Because we know that a great resource for a high school student is not necessarily a great resource for a fourth grader, we've also introduced SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently features on the first results page the high quality Web sites created for elementary school students. Read this blog post to understand more about how we created SweetSearch, and its integration with Yolink, a remarkable tool that helps students quickly browse through rows of search results without opening them.

Though your students will now be using the best search engines for students, they should still learn the Ten Steps to Better Web Research. To help them, we've published this presentation on Teaching the Ten Steps, which has gotten more than 12,000 views in its first two month.

Once you've found all these great Web resources, you'll want to share them with your students, and colleagues. So we created findingEducation, a bookmarking and sharing tool that we describe in this blog post as your digital classroom. If exploited by educators to its full potential, findingEducation will become the free, paperless successor to those expensive, landfill-busting textbooks that burden your students backpacks each year.

At this year's annual conference of the National Social Studies Supervisors Association, we gave this presentation on "A Practical Approach to Integrating the Web and Technology into the Social Studies Classroom." Feedback on the presentation has been stellar, and indeed we've already been invited to present at next year's conference, as well as a half dozen state and regional conferences. This blog post has links to the many stellar examples of effective use of the Web by educators, as well as other outstanding social studies resources.

Please send me feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. on our Social Studies content and tools, to Mark.Moran@DulcineaMedia.com

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media

Educators Will Create the Successor to Textbooks

This summer, The New York Times featured yet another article on how to replace textbooks. Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, estimated that the U.S. education system spends $8-$15 billion per year on text books. One study claims that only 11% of this expenditure actually goes to creating content. Of course, printing, distributing and disposing of textbooks also comes at an enormous environmental cost.

The primary alternatives discussed in the NYT article are open-sourced, digital textbooks that can be customized by an educator.

But while the successors to textbooks surely will be digital, they won't be a textbook at all:

• They won't be created by an education company that bends to politically driven agendas, a phenomenon that has been around long before last year's Texas controversy;
• "chapters" won't reflect the perspective of just a few writers and editors, but rather the voices of thousands of educators; 
• in subjective areas, they won't require students to memorize particular "facts" and viewpoints, but rather will encourage them to think for themselves, and form their own perspectives; and
• they won't impose a "one size fits all" approach to learning on a diverse group of students, with different interests, abilities and needs.

The successor to textbooks will be created by a group of passionate educators who, in the words of John Carver, superintendent of Van Meter (Iowa) Schools, collectively decide that no one should have "ownership" over what is taught in schools.

There are a number of approaches that could render a product that meets the above objectives. However:

• A Wiki that is subject to the whims of a narrow band of editors with a lot of time to devote to winning ideological battles would preclude the involvement of the contributors with the most to offer;
• a "silo" approach to publishing, where educators post work only on their own school sites, will inhibit the collaboration necessary to develop depth, breadth and scale quickly; and
• there must be some central administration to continually enhance the solution in response to educator feedback.

At the recent Techonomy Conference, Bill Gates predicted that in five years, the best college education will come from the Web. But in many subjects, innovative educators are already using the Web to deliver the best educational experience to their fortunate students. Thousands of teachers and librarians around the world are finding, and sharing with their students, outstanding Web resources - including primary sources, expert analysis and countervailing viewpoints - that dwarf the information available in any textbook. These teachers are also creating lesson plans and assignments that test students' critical thinking and relevant communication skills, rather than prepare them to fill in bubbles on a standardized test. And they teach students how to effectively use the Web resources they'll use the rest of their life, and not a textbook that will soon join a landfill.

Many of these educators post their assignments on the Web; often on a school Web site, sometimes on a blog or other platform. This spring, when my daughter and her friends became concerned one of their  teachers wasn't adequately preparing them for an Advanced Placement Exam, they sought out materials on the Web, and eventually settled on a teacher in Northern Virginia as having the best exam prep materials. Everyone in my daughter's group passed the exam, while several of their classmates did not. I recently learned about a remarkable site for teachers and students of English created by Sandra Effinger; I foresee AP test takers from all over the country accessing her resources in coming years; here is a similar site for high school psychology.

The number of sites like the ones offered by these two educators will grow exponentially in coming years. What is needed is a central repository that collects many of them, so that teachers can access assignments created by other teachers, and learn from, and build on them. And if that repository was also one that made it easy for teachers to find great resources in the first place, and provided a free mechanism for sharing the resources and assignments with their students and colleagues, well, all the better. And if it promised a whole host of new features in the near future? It could very well become the successor to textbooks.

And that is what our free product, findingEducation, offers. It's in Alpha stage, and we can do a lot to make it better, but in its current form, the potential for it is clear. Its back-end is powered by SweetSearch and the content of findingDulcinea to help educators easily find the best online resources about any subject. Its My Library enables teachers to save the links they find to a bookmarking tool, and then share them with students on their assignment page. It combines assignment management and quality resource discovery into a “digital classroom.” Teachers are welcome to "frame" the page for the digital classroom so that it appears integrated into the school Website, with their own look and feel.

The ultimate value in findingEducation comes when it becomes heavily used by outstanding educators. For example, once hundreds, or thousands, of U.S. History teachers create assignments for, and provide links to materials about, the U.S Civil War, then a new teacher entering the fray can create a new assignment that synthesizes the best of the predecessor works. Teachers can identify other teachers who consistently create outstanding assignments, and use them as a model for their own.

What will it take for findingEducation to create a critical mass that will turn it into a "must use" tool? Sponsorship by a large education entity or organization that will encourage use by a substantial number of members. We can even create a separate file for these organizations to co-brand the offering and make it easy for members of the organization to find each other's work. Organizations such as AASA, NSSSA, NCSS, and ALA should have a keen interest in discussing this possibility with us, as should state and regional education departments.

We have a number of modules and additional features that can be introduced into findingEducation once it develops a meaningful user base.

For more information on findingEducation:

See a sample page: http://markskillman.findingeducation.com/

Take our site tour.

See our help section for our FAQ and other tips for using findingEducation.

For more information or to contact us with inquiries, comments or feedback, e-mail info@findingeducation.com or write me directly at Mark.Moran@DulcineaMedia.com

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

Dulcinea Media, Inc.

Question Number One: Who Wrote This?

Finding information on the Internet is like being a good police detective: the information is only as good as its source. And, like a good detective, a good Web researcher never decides to use information without considering who gave it to him. He asks, “Who created this Web site, and who is the author of the content I'm reading?”

Now, this may seem obvious, but when we asked 300 students how they know they can trust information on a Web site, very few of them said they look at the site's publisher and its authors. And I've even way too many adults recommend a Web site even though the site itself offered no information about who created it.

Is the site's publisher a scientific journal, a law firm, a university or a well-established news organization? Are the writers professors, journalists or experts in the field?

Does the site employ a whole editorial team, with full-time writers and skilled editors who review everything, or are the publisher and writer the same person—someone with a lot of knowledge about, and passion for, the topic? If the latter, is he just publishing the site as a hobby? If so, the consequences for getting information wrong are minimal.

Is the author simply trying to entertain you, or sell you something, or get you to donate money to a cause?

Who cares? Google sorts this all out for you, and lists the sites from the best writers first, right?

Wrong.

In fact, the opposite is usually true.

Someone who wants to sell you something works hard to make his site rank higher than it should. And someone who is passionate about a topic and unburdened by journalistic or academic guidelines may write an entertaining article that is linked to often and thus ranks well in search engines.

On the other hand, many experts and professors don't even try to make their Web sites rank high in search engines.

When I explained why SweetSearch was the best search engine for students, I showed several examples of the biggest search engines giving prominence to sites that didn't say who they were published by or who authored their articles.

So how do you find out who published the site and why?

The “About Us” section of a site is a good place to start. If the site doesn't list the name of the publisher and its management team—and this is often the case—then hit your “back” button and visit another site. You would never trust a book without knowing its author and publisher; why would you trust a Web site without the same information?

But the “About Us” can't be the end of your research. Look for additional information about the publisher or author and their credentials elsewhere on the Web site, and then by searching their names in a search engine. Any reputable publisher or author should be mentioned on other reputable Web sites. For an author, search the name along with key subject words to see if he or she has written other articles on the subject for other publications. Usually someone who is an expert on a topic writes about it often for several different publications.

Now that you know how to find out who wrote this, also ask:

Question Number Two: Why Did They Write This?

Question Number Three: When Did They Write This?

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

The two most important questions to ask when evaluating a Web site

Many students evaluate Web sites using a long list of criteria, but pay little heed to the most important two:

Who publishes this Web site and wrote its content, and why?

When we asked 300 high school and middle school students how they know they can trust information on a Web site, few mentioned evaluating the site's publisher and its authors. Further, I've seen hundreds of cases where intelligent professionals have recommend, or cited, a Web site without knowing who published its content. When I evaluate a Web site, "who" and "why" are the first questions I ask, and it often only takes me a few seconds to decide to move on to the next Web site.

The publisher and its authors may be scientists, doctors, lawyers, or professors seeking to enhance professional reputations. Or it may be a news organization staffed by people with years of journalism education and training, with strong editorial guidelines, and a veteran editing team. The site may be published by an intelligent person who has a lot of knowledge about, and passion for, the topic, but who is publishing the site as a hobby, and doesn't necessarily care if he gets it exactly right.  It may have been written by someone who is merely looking to entertain you.  Or sell you something, or get you to donate money to a cause.

I've listed these types of possible authors in order of credibility. You might think that this also reflects their ranking in major search engines. In fact, the opposite is usually true. Someone looking to sell you something devotes a lot of resources to manipulating search engines so his site ranks higher than it should. And someone who is passionate about a topic and not burdened by journalistic or academic guidelines may write an entertaining site that is linked to often, and thus ranks well in search engines. Conversely, professional and academic experts usually put no effort into making their Web sites rank well in search engines.

When I explained why SweetSearch was the best search engine for students, I compared its search results for "War of 1812" and "Shakespeare" to those of Google and Bing. Those search engines prominently listed sites because that were recently published, and whose purpose was to get you to visit a city or watch a movie. Others were trying to sell you products, or were written by people whose credentials were little more than "I really love Shakespeare." Do you want to trust your grade to information found on any of these sites?

So how do you find out who published the site, and why?

The “About Us” section of a site is a good place to start. If the site doesn't list the name of the publisher and its management team - and this is often the case - then hit your Back button and visit another site. You would never trust a book without knowing its author and publisher; why would you trust a Web site without the same information?

But the About Us can't be the end of your research. Look for additional information about the publisher or author, and their intentions, elsewhere on the Web site, and then by searching the names in a search engine. Any reputable publisher or author should be mentioned on other reputable Web sites. For an author, search the name along with key subject words to see if he or she has written other articles, for other publications, on the subject. Usually someone who is an expert on a topic writes about it often, for several different publications.

Once you know who published the Web site and wrote the content, you have to ask, "Why?"

When we create our Web Guides for findingDulcinea, we usually provide research strategies that caution you to be wary of sites that aren't what they seem. We've come across dozens of Web sites that appear to offer valid information but in fact were created for another purpose. Some of these we explained in a feature called "Suspicious Sites," that is an ideal tool for learning how to decipher "why" a site was created. Many Web sites provide so-called information about a health topic, but were published by lawyers looking for medical malpractice clients. We've uncovered Web sites that appear on the surface to provide good information about mortgages, financial advice, insurance, plastic surgery options or drug treatment centers, but their only purpose was to collect your personal information so they could sell it to companies or individuals offering those services. In a more common example, recently we wrote about a highly celebrated woman who achievements were the subject of a good faith, historic dispute; we noted that a government-funded "Hall of Fame" site failed to even mention the controversy. The stated purpose of the site was to honor woman who have made lasting contributions, and apparently it felt that this mission would be compromised by reporting the controversy.

In all these cases, publishing accurate, balanced information was not the primary purpose of the Web site.

Of course, you should use a full list of criteria when evaluating a Web site. But as soon as a Web site loads on your computer, ask yourself "who" and "why"?

Mark Moran

Founder & CEO

Sweet Sites | Don't Know Much About Music?

In the research section of our Web Guide to Music we’ve touted allmusic, an underrated encyclopedic resource of artist biographies and album reviews. If you’re reading a review of an album on Answers.com or in the iTunes Music Store, it often originates at allmusic.

Stream through your favorites in dozens of genres with Lala, a site that lets you both stream and download music. In a companion piece to this blog post on findingDulcinea, “Enjoying Music on the Web—Legally,” we discussed Lala and a few comparable sites. Lala stands out because of its extensive archive of 7 million songs, including classical, country, classic rock, pop, jazz and indie rock. Artist pages on Lala often include bios, as well as links to similar artists and Lala users who streamed or bought the artist.

Essentials of Music is a classical music destination with composer biographies, MP3 samples of their work and articles on major eras in classical music. The site is based on the W. W. Norton book title, “Essential Classics.”

Parents, get your children educated about classical music with Cincinnati Public Radio’s Classics for Kids, a site with radio shows, audio samples, articles on periods and composers, special features and games.

Mainstream and indie music fans alike will appreciate the new Billboard. The site used to be a hard-to-access database of music charts and news. Now it’s a glossy, colorful, multimedia-filled publisher with interactive music charts, news, interviews, concert coverage and more.

If you like Billboard, be sure to check out “5 Must-Book Music Sites,” a must-read for indie music fans that are just getting their feet wet online. It features five top sites in five categories—concert listings, MP3 blog, music magazine, lyric database and video site—as well as five runners-up.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

Do You Know What’s in Your Food?

You’ve snugly secured your lunch, a chicken sandwich with vegetable fixings and mayo, in plastic cling wrap. But is your lettuce local, your chicken free range and your plastic free of #3 PVC? True, the thought of eating only perfectly clean, chemical-free food seems at times an overwhelming task. But the clutter of opinions and information on the Web has slowly given way to a more organized set of standards.

Some products are easier to dissect, ingredient-wise, than others. For instance, in the GLAD Web site FAQ section, the company reveals that it does not use PVC or BPA (Bisphenol-A), a potentially harmful and oft-debated ingredient used in many plastic water bottles.

But not all companies make the contents of their products available to consumers. Luckily, there’s GoodGuide, a so-called “B Corporation” that harnesses “the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.” The staff at GoodGuide ranks products’ impact on human health, the environment and other social factors, such as labor force. To determine rankings, GoodGuide consults with experts at academic institutions and nongovernmental organizations, considers government data and works with “private research firms.” The site is in beta, but plans to eventually allow users to sort through ranked products according to their own value systems. Read the GoodGuide Transparency Manifesto to get a handle on the site’s ambitious mission.

GoodGuide cofounder Dara O’Rourke, a professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley, was profiled by Michael B. Farrell for The Christian Science Monitor last month. O’Rourke explains that GoodGuide can help people “make better choices about what they buy,” and contends that “[t]ransparency will make the world better.” O’Rourke’s endeavor, which has involved “scientists and engineers working out of an office in downtown San Francisco” over the past year or so, already boasts 75,000 rated products. GoodGuide seems fast on its way to becoming “a sort of CliffsNotes to the confounding and complex world of ingredients typically—but not always—found listed on the back of everyday products,” Farrell noted.

Concerned consumers can also turn to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an organization that provides helpful information on food additives like artificial food dyes, caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup. The site also discusses the safety of the additives in its glossary, and has a list of banned additives.

And for general advice about reading and understanding food labels, read findingDulcinea’s "Foodie" column on the subject.       

Sarah Amandolare
Senior Writer