Civic Online Reasoning and Lateral Reading
With so much of our information coming from the open web, researchers at Stanford have developed a new framework for evaluating sources called Civic Online Reasoning (COR). This approach to source evaluation is concerned with answering the following three questions:
- Who’s behind the information?
- What’s the evidence?
- What do other sources say?
But how do we go about answering these questions, especially if they aren’t explicitly stated in the source itself? In order to answer these questions about a source, we have to look at it from the outside. This is called “lateral reading” and it involves searching the web for more information about the source. Wikipedia is a great place to search for information about authors, publishers, and organizations behind materials you may find on the web.