"Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him." Ernest Hemingway, 1954.

These days with more and more information available, you'll have to agree with Hemingway here. How do we sort out what is good from bad and how to we share the tactics with our students?

Howard Rheingold writes in Crap Detection 101,"Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. The good stuff is out there if you know how to find and verify it. Basic information literacy, widely distributed, is the best protection for the knowledge commons: A sufficient portion of critical consumers among the online population can become a strong defense against the noise-death of the Internet."

Some of his recommendations include using easywhois.com to check
who owns a website, checking whether sites have .edu or .gov endings, looking for references for facts, using debunking sites like Snopes and fact checking information on sites like factchecked.org and factcheck.org.

Read more here: Crap Detector 101, Howard Rheingold

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805#ixzz0yDsCbfaN