The Federa Trade Commission has developed a series of quiz-style games designed to teach skills related to trust onlineThe current suite of games includes “Beware of Spyware”, “Phishing Scams” and “Buddy Builder”, a game designed to teach young people to avoid dangerous people on social networking sites. [via]
In similar news, the Educational Testing Service has developed a new information literacy assessment test that includes a set of brief activities in a web browser. This trend toward more interactive interventions will hopefully help develop young people’s competencies in these areas. However, the preliminary results are less than stellar: only 49% of participants correctly identified the most trustworthy website from a set of sites. Fortunately, it looks like there is still work to be done in this area.

The November issue of First Monday contains an article from Thomas Chesney that describes a comparative evaluation of Wikipedia pages by experts and non-experts. A group of researcers were asked to evaluate pages from Wikipedia in their subject area or outside of their subject area. Chesney found that subject experts rated Wikipedia pages more highly than non-experts.

The article contains relatively little discussion about why this difference might occur, but there are clearly some interesting things going on here.

The MacArthur Foundation’s Spotlight Blog recently featured a discussion about credibility and digital media. Notable researchers from a number of universities sound off on the most important issues facing web credibility today.