Web-Site Authority Testing

        Many writing teachers have some version of this strategy to help students break through the Internet's technological attractions so that they can see how graphics and other web-based strategies create our unconscious belief in a page's authority.  Virgil Wong's RYT Hospital--Dwayne Medical Center web site simulates a convincing but absurd advanced medical technology research site that touts the results of its scientists' work.  The "medical breakthroughs" announced there are described with many of the visual devices which students typically assume will guarantee truth or accuracy.  Wong is a visual artist and programmer of considerable talent.  It also includes web-based features like researchers' weekly web logs ("blogs"), visitor comments and questions, and interactive displays, including an order form for made-to-order genetically modified babies and a dialogue with a gene-spliced talking mouse.

        Once students have become more proficient in detecting web page attributes that create authority, the conversation can move backward in time to print media.  Periodicals and books have different kinds of physical cues readers use to determine the source's level of authority, and some (somber bindings, reference pages, authors with advanced degrees) can be "spoofed" as easily as Virgil Wong's simulated medical breakthrough announcements.  From the superficial and unconscious cues, the conversation can be guided to the more important guarantees of source quality which publishers offer.  Chief among these is peer-reviewed publication.  It's not a fool-proof process, and failures in peer-review mechanisms are useful to discuss, too.  Nevertheless, by the end of the conversation, most students will have a better idea of how difficult it is to achieve high quality when publishing a source, and how carefully that quality needs to be guarded from careless contamination by the lowest quality sources.  That also offers an opportunity to discuss the safer, "ladder of expertise" method of building one's ability to use the best sources by working up from the next-best sources.

        This assignment also can be used on conjunction with the "Jargon, Terms of Art, Method, and Membership in Scholarly Communities" assignment.