Later on the owner posted an article indicating that he had tried one of the suggested diets, and that the cat had nearly died. While information about one's cat is not likely to be regarded as critical, it does point out that while information may be freely available, there is no guarantee of its reliability. Of course, the same statement could be made about any print material as well, but the process of editorial control, in principle, should reduce the chances of this happening. If nothing else, at least the sources of information will probably be documented in more traditional reference sources. Teach students to be skeptical of the information they find on the net .
Students tend to give great credence to textual material.
Have students carefully document each source, and make some judgements about its reliability. A possible activity would be to have students gather as much information as they can on a topic, then in small groups compare what they have found, and rank order the information as to what they feel is its reliability. Before we had access to the graphical World Wide Web with all of its wonderful hyper text linked documents, I had a few dedicated students using the Internet from a Unix text based system. This was never really very successful. They soon tired of reading the chat news groups.