E-tivity 8

Judging Online Sources

In her comments on e-tivity 5 (social bookmarking), Roberta said: “I think there are also a drawback, a limit in its use: you cannot know how people value what they have found, I mean, you cannot know according to which criteria a person judges a website as a good or bad one.” Many of you have made similar comments about podcasts and YouTube as well. Nonetheless, you have certainly been judging a lot of online sources since we started this course. This week’s e-tivity is about reflection and discussion and you won’t have to learn how to use any new tool!

Purpose: To reflect on and discuss what criteria you do use and can be used to judge the almost limitless amount of information on the Internet.

Task:

1 – Many of you will be writing your theses soon and there’s no doubt that you will be using the Internet as part of your research. Whenever you do research, be it in the library or online, you have to judge the information you come across. I’d like you to think about what criteria you use to make these judegments. Author? Publisher? Peer rating? Look? etc. Make some notes about this either on paper or in your blog.

2 – Find out what suggestions other universities make for students. Go to the websites listed below and see what they say. Do you agree? Disagree? Have they pointed things out you had not thought of? Feel free, of course, to do your own searches too ;-)

Tips from the University of Essex

Tips from Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL)

Tips from San Diego State University

3 – Write a blog post describing what criteria you have used, and will use in the future, to evaluate sources of information, be they online or not.

Respond: Read the other the posts of the members of your group. Write a comment agreeing/disagreeing/reflecting on what your peers have said. Come to class Monday ready to discuss the conclusions you have come to as a group.

Timeline: Friday, November 30 (task), Monday, December 3 (respond).