NPR's All Things Considered did a story about RTmark (pronounced "Art
Mark). It's a
group that does publicity pranks, etc (it's too complicated to explain
but you can listen to the
piece from the NPR site).
RTmark is responsible for the well-reported "fake" gwbush site which
I've used in classes to teach
evaluation. Their site describes the background of that project
(which I had not known). They also
give examples of other "rogue sites" as they call them. Although
their entire site is
interestesting (http://www.rtmark.com)
you can get to the "rogue sites" section by going to:
"past projects" (at the top of main page)
"ongoing projects" (bottom of left list)
"rogue sites"
I recommend the NPR piece and could even see using that as part of the teaching.
I have also used:
http://www.martinlutherking.org
(also sent in by Ona Lou Britton)
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/
and would sometime like to use:
http://www.d-b.net/dti/
cloning hoax
http://www.dhmo.org
hilarious---watch out for the DHMO! (also sent in by Mark Singer
and Lisa Oberg)
Check out Christopher cox's list of sites for evaluation from the Gordon
Library at WPI:
http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/Library/Training/webeval.html#ex
Here are a few sites that I've used in classes on evaluating web sites:
A couple of political parodies:
http://www.georgewbush.com
vs.
http://www.gwbush.com (also
sent in by Ona Lou Britton)
http://rudyyes.com (not so useful now
that he's dropped out!)
vs.
http://yesrudy.com
http://www.whitehouse.net
vs.
http://www.whitehouse.gov
Does aspartame cause MS or lupus?
http://www.dorway.com/wec-ms95.html
vs.
http://www.msfacts.org/aspartame.htm
Two examples I use are:
http://www.martinlutherking.org
which
isn't really a hoax. It's just an awful site
(in my opinion) with terrible stories about MLK, Jr.'s last night and
all
the wrongdoings of his life. I understand it is run by a hate group,
but it
sure looks like a classic salute to a well-respected American civil
rights
leader - until you take a very close look.
and
the Internet Addiction one, which we enjoy so much and is always popular
with undergraduates (we have a whole *routine* that goes with it)
http://www.albany.edu/library/internet/addiction.html
I hope this helps. I'd like to hear of any you know of, too, if you
don't
mind. I am teaching a session for our graduate teaching assistants
training
in August on doing effective research on the Internet. I need to spin
it to
even more scholarly information than my usual approach.
Ken Winters has a nice compilation of "hoax" and "questionable" web
sites
you might make use of, including the famous Mankato, MN page!
"Questionable Web Sites"
http://www.vmi.edu/library/kw/questionable.htm
I teach BI at a small 4 year college. I developed a hoax page that I show students and then ask them to look at it and evaluate. I ask them what they think of the page using criteria that I give them. The complete page is bogus including all the Excel spreadsheets that I put in. I know this isn't exactly what you were talking about but I have found this to be a very effective way to teach the students to think critically about WebPages. The responses I get from the students are usually pretty interesting. They range from being appalled that someone would put false information on the web to thinking it is pretty funny. Those responses give me a chance to show how easy it was to do what I did. You might notice that I chose a ridiculous topic for a page that many would recognize as kind of odd.
I would be interested in the other responses that you get.
http://www.crk.umn.edu/library/links/evaluating.htm
I just finished a class I was giving on Internet Research, and I used
some
examples
that I think got the message through that you can't trust everything
you see
on
the Internet.
This first one is a fake article that actually was published in a legitimate
journal by a researcher who wanted to show that some journals are not
that careful
about what they accept for publication. Since the article is there
for
people to stumble across on the Internet, it makes a good example,
and has the
advantage that the author provides plenty of explanation elsewhere
on the site about
how this all transpired, what his motivations were, and how it really
was a
hoax.
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
Politicians get picked on a lot through "unofficial" sites, so I showed
my
class this one:
For a list of items (some genuine, some fake), see the following. I
used it
as an in-class exercise, assigning one item to each student. Then everybody
told
the class how they tried to check on the validity of the information,
and their
conclusions about whether they were hoaxes or not. It turned out to
be a lot of fun.
http://www.library.georgetown.edu/internet/eval.htm
Try these sites:
http://147.129.1.10/library/research/AIDSFACTS.htm
http://www.dhmo.org/
http://www.d-b.net/dti/
http://www.improb.com/airchives/classical/cat/cat.html
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Alley/7028/hasta.htm
The Mankato web site (one of our library's favorite) is still there,
but the
url changed slightly. You can now find it at:
http://lme.mankato.msus.edu/mankato/mankato.html
I would have really missed the whale watching on the Minnesota River.....