READ ALL OF THESE DIRECTIONS BEFORE YOU BEGIN
How do you know if something on the Internet is true? In other words, how do you assess the credibility of a website?
We are going to use the following criteria in order to determine whether or not a website is valid for academic/educational purposes.
- Coverage: Does the web site give you too little or too much information on your topic for you to get a good idea, or is it just right?
- Origin: Who created this web site? Is he or she an expert in this field? What credentials (college degrees, research, published articles, and career accomplishments) does he or she provide? If there are no easily discernible credentials for the author of the website, make note of that too.
- Currency: When was this site last updated (look at the bottom of the page)? If it does not give a last updated date, please note that. Also, check out any links? Are they expired or do they still work? Do you feel this is a current or out-of-date site and why?
- Objectivity: What does objectivity mean? Does this site read like an encyclopedia or do you feel a bias (a strong opinion for or against) towards the subject? Do you feel this site is objective or opinionated and why?
- Accuracy: Name any factual or grammatical errors you find. Why do errors on a web site make us doubt the validity of a site? If there are no errors that you can find, note that too.
- Purpose: What do you think is the author’s purpose in creating this site: informing, entertaining, or persuading? If persuading, what does the author want us to do or think? Does the purpose make the site less reliable as a good source for information on this topic?
- Extensions: What is the two to three letter extension for this site (the most common extensions are: org, com, mil, edu, net, and gov)? Is there a tilde (~) in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL or address)? A tilde tell us it’s a personal and not a company, university, or museum site. If it does have a tilde, what does that tilde mean to us as informed consumers of the web?
- Common sense: What does your gut tell you about this site? Is it a valid site for information or not and why?
Project
For this project, you will need to follow ALL of the directions below. Make sure you don’t miss a step. This is your first graded assignment. You must work independently through each of these steps.
- Open Microsoft Word. You want a blank document.
- SAVE the document to your Documents Folder. The filename should be your first name and last initial dash eval1 Example: johnd-eval1.doc
- Type your First and Last name in the top left corner of the document
- Title your document Website Evaluations. Your title should be centered and bolded.
- Check out the following websites. What do you think? Are they true or untrue? Go to each site, review it using the criteria described above, and write real or unreal. You must also write a brief explanation as to why you believe it to be true or not.
- Make sure that you bold the name of each item on the list in your Word document, and then assess each site below the term. You must address each of the criteria listed above.
List of items to evaluate:
Click on each link to learn about the terms. You must go to each of these sites and assess each site based on the criteria for evaluating websites.