(2017-03-13) Udell Teaching Students To Marshal Evidence And Evaluate Claims

Jon Udell on Teaching Students to Marshal Evidence and Evaluate Claims

now online Annotations can identify and link to claims in those web pages and PDFs.

Here are some of the ways teachers use web annotation:

• To prepopulate an online text with questions for students to answer
• To mark and explain rhetorical strategies
• To teach students to check facts, trace provenance, and evaluate sources4

Mike Caulfield, 2017 editor of this New Horizons series of columns in EDUCAUSE Review, has launched the Digital Polarization Initiative. It's a template for a cross-institutional course in which students learn how to evaluate claims in news stories.

A single investigation may require students to find, organize, and present evidence found online in dozens of HTML or PDF documents. For each document, the student may need to cite several statements, ideally using annotations to point to them directly. Once all this evidence has been gathered and organized, the student draws on it to write an analysis, which may conclude that the claim is true, false, or indeterminate.

we at Hypothes.is have created the DigiPo toolkit.6 It's a Chrome extension that embodies best practices for fact-checkers and works closely with the DigiPo wiki widgets that display annotation-based evidence.

Here's an underappreciated best practice: if you tag a set of documents consistently, you create a collection that can be cited with a URL that queries for the tag. In the Digital Polarization Initiative projects, every investigation happens on its own Wiki page. When annotations are tagged with the name of the wiki page, they appear in several collections included in the page. One collection gathers all of the evidence that supports the investigation. Another arranges a subset of the evidence on a timeline so that investigators (and readers) can reason about the history of the topic. Students could assign those tags manually, but that's awkward and error-prone. So right-click options to tag a source page (or a selected claim) offer a list of current investigations.