What is bias?

bi·as/ˈbīəs/ Noun       Prejudice in favor or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.

Jeff Utecht at the Thinking Stick has presented a series of lessons on evaluating web resources. These are wonderful sets of plans (worthy of a good librarian). In the 3rd-5th grade lesson, he asks:

How do we know if we can trust a site?

There are a couple of key pieces of information that will help us decide if we can trust a site or not. Each of us needs to make up our minds if we can trust the site, in the end it’s a judgement call on the user’s part. But these key pieces of information can help us.

Authority

Currency

Content/Purpose

Audience

Structure/Workability

While I am not quite sure what "Stucture/Workabiity" means, I like the other criteria. I would only add "Evidence of bias" - which, to be fair, may be inferred by purpose and audience. 

Librarians have struggled with morphing from information evaluators to teachers of information evaluation for a number of years. I am delighted to see Jeff encouraging teachers to assume this role as well. Quite frankly, it's about time that classroom teacher help kids do a little website (or any medium) crap detection. Classroom teachers are neo-librarians in 21st Century classrooms - they just don't know it yet.

In a 2001 article for Creative Classroom, Survival Skills for the Information Jungle, I also suggested that website evaluation is critical and gave a few simple criteria:

Information jungle survival skill 3: Learn to tell the good berries from the bad berries.
Joey Rogers, Executive Director of the Urban Library Council, observes that libraries should have two large signs in them. The first hanging over the stacks that reads “Carefully selected by trained professionals” and the other hanging over the Internet terminals that reads “Whatever.”

Even very young students can and should be learning to tell the bad information berries from the good ones. Since junior high students often make websites that often look better than those of college professors, we teach students to look:

For the same information from multiple sources.

At the age of the page.

At the credentials of the author.

For unstated bias by the page author or sponsor.

Bias is only telling one side of a story. Both the Sierra Club and Exxon may have perfectly accurate information on their websites or other media releases about oil drilling and its impact on the environment, but they are both selective about the "truths" they choose to share or emphasize. Those who view information need to ask, "What's in it for the one doing the communicating if the information is understood (and believed)?

In case you haven't noticed, it's campaign season in the U.S. I can't think of a better time to teach bias - shown by both sides of the political spectrum.