Tentacled Tree Hugger Disarms Seventh Graders

Late last year, University of Connecticut professor Donald Leu asked 25 Connecticut seventh graders to evaluate a website on the endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) as part of an online literacy survey. What he learned may shock you.

According to what little scientists know about it, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus is an amphibious species restricted to the temperate rainforests of the North American Pacific coast. The arboreal creatures abandon their coniferous homes each spring and migrate to the waters of Puget Sound to spawn. Sadly, years of logging, urban growth, overharvesting during the nineteenth century for hat accessories and depredation by its natural predator, the sasquatch, has driven this species to critically low levels.

Of the 25 seventh-graders identified as their schools’ best online readers, 24 recommended this bogus website to another class that Leu had told them was also researching endangered species. In other words, they bought the tentacled tree-hugger hook, line and sinker – fooled by the scientific-sounding text, the photos and the e-mail address, Leu said. Even after they were let in on the hoax, most of the students had difficulty deciphering the clues that betrayed the site’s fictitiousness. Some still maintained that the octopus really exists.

The survey is part of a U.S. Department of Education-funded research project, “Teaching Internet Comprehension to Adolescents,” currently under way at Leu’s New Literacies Research Lab. The project’s goal is to improve how adolescents are taught today’s new literacies, including parsing search-engine results, critically evaluating online content, interpreting hyperlinks and communicating effectively by e-mail.

In a related survey, Leu’s team found that 57% of 75 students from South Carolina schools admitted they never check the accuracy of web content. Fifty-nine percent never look to see who created a website’s content. Only 4% of the students – three kids – background check their web searches. Leu says that based on what his team hears from teachers, the results of this small study appear to be representative of student bodies at large.

It’s understandable that adults and children alike can be easily bamboozled by pseudoscientific web content that’s been made to look official. The Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website features “sighting” photographs of the species enhanced through “ZPi cephalopod-image processing technology.” It also boasts a scan of a 1923 Cascadia Evening Post cover depicting a tree-octopus hat, a gift shop that sells tree octopus t-shirts and even a Friend of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (FOTPNWTO) tentacle-ribbon image for those interested in linking to the site. For those that dig deeper, the site also provides hyperlinks to The Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs (“Serving the needs of Cascadian Sasquatch”), preliminary field notes on the Rock Nest Monster (Cryptogorgo petronidus), and a “Belgium Doesn’t Exist” website that questions the country’s existence.

The tree octopus and many of its offshoots are the brainchildren of Lyle Zapato, the “intradimensional” guru of Zapato Productions. Since the tree octopus was first described, by Zapato in 1998, the public’s interaction with the website has evolved from a link you forward to friends to a learning tool for educators, students and researchers like Leu. And although the cat is out of the bag, Zapato insists he maintains the site simply to document the sad plight of the tree octopus. “I mean, who wants to live in a world without tree octopuses?” he asks. “Certainly not I.” When students e-mail to ask if the tree octopus is real, Zapato writes back, “They are as real as the sasquatch that prey upon them.”

But however charming, The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus page is just one example of the oh-so-many websites that challenge the literacy of web surfers of all ages. Google, for example, has posted a job advertisement for engineers to staff their Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (GCHEESE) lunar hosting and research center, due to open this spring. And have you ever wondered how Google Googles so well? Turns out, they’ve developed a new search technology – PigeonRank – using the cheap labor of domestic pigeon clusters to process data. There’s also the Ova Prima Foundation, whose straight-faced website expounds upon the Foundation’s goals to settle the which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg debate once and for all.

Deciphering the accuracy of Web content has been a problem since the get-go. It costs next to nothing to slap up a webpage, and in many cases it’s hard to figure out exactly who has written the content or what they have in the way of qualifications. Of course, the Web’s not entirely full of crap. Take, for example, the study conducted by the journal Nature in 2005, which pitted two encyclopedias against each other. Britannica, the trusty reference whose first edition was published in 1768 versus Wikipedia, the free, collaborative reference site that debuted online in 2001. Only four gross errors apiece were found in 42 Britannica and Wikipedia articles reviewed on topics ranging from the Cambrian Explosion to Pythagoras’ theorem. Even old, trusted sources, it seems, aren’t necessarily the gold standard. But how is your average web surfer to know whom to trust?

As the first year of the New Literacies Research Lab’s three-year project comes to a close, the team will be changing gears to work out the kinks in their new lesson plans.  In one exercise, for example, pairs of students will research and write their own wiki entries with feedback from teams in partner classes. Such collaborations will give students insight into what wikis are, how they are prepared and how their text can evolve – important skills they can apply the next time they’re asked to make critical decisions about websites they visit.

So before you nyah-nyah Connecticut’s prepubescent student body for their gullibility (a word that really isn’t in the dictionary, by the way), take a moment to re-examine your own Web surfing habits. Yes, perhaps even the website you’re perusing right now. How sure are you that what you’re reading is the real McCoy? If you read it online, it must be true. Right?