What's the big deal with exposing "truth?"

As the great Obi Wan once said to young Skywalker, about his previous statement that Darth Vader had killed his father "what I told you was true... from a certain point of view." 

The internet is full of ideas and content that while fabulous and exhaustive, is definitely not all correct, appropriate or truthful. It depends greatly on the point-of-view of the creators and their reason for disseminating information. A large part of literacy today is not the ability to just read the words, but the ability to evaluate all the words that are being read. In the past, when it cost a lot of money to create information in print, the cost alone helped to eliminate some of the less reputable information from just appearing, but needless to say even some printed materials are only true "from a certain point of view." 

However, today anyone with a library card can post seemingly "true" information to the internet free of charge. It's kind of like buying a gag-gift for someone. If you had to spend $100 on it, you might decide not to get it because the financial outlay dissuades you from the "mis-information", but if you could get it for free or very little cost, you are more than happy to hand out your gag-gift to any who might accept it. The same holds true for information, if you had to spend $100,000 of your own money to get a book printed because only you (or your fringe group) thought it was good information, you would be less likely to do so. (Which brings up the whole thought process of, buyer beware on free ebooks, because they are incredibly inexpensive to publish now.) There is something to be said for the gatekeepers that have guarded the quality of printed material (once only clerics copied books), for now we must do the gatekeeping on our own and decide what is true, from our point of view. 

Teaching our students and even ourselves to seek that truth can be challenging but Warlick, and others have many helpful tools available to make the process easier, you can find blogs, checklists, self-reflective questions and yes, even video games.

-N