Will Hochman
Fall 2002
Can you use the following annotated links from the 11/2002 TechRhet email list strand "Links for Evaluating Online Resources?" to gain a stronger sense of how to evaluate sources?
on 11/2/02 12:34 PM, Dan Butcher at danbutcher@earthlink.net wrote:
" Anyone know of a good web site that explains how to evaluate online resources
for credibility?"
Steven D. Krause said "My librarian colleague here at EMU Keith Stanger has a great site part of his oh so awesome library site. The evaluation part is at
http://keithstanger.com/ineteval.htm
Margaret Barber said "Esther Grassian's is good--
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/critical/
It has a link to evaluating discipline-based sources as well. One sign of no credibility: if the site hasn't enough information to fill all the blanks in a COS citation, forget it. Having it doesn't necessarily mean the site's credible, but at least the info is there to give you a chance to weigh it."
Judy Kilborn said "I have an annotated webliography on web site validity available at"
http://stcloudstate.edu/~kilbornj/webvalidation.html
Mary Tigner-Rasanen said "here are two - very different"
http://gateway.lib.ohio-state.edu/tutor/les1/index.html
http://www.media-awareness.ca/eng/webaware/2joes/johome.htm
Michael Day said, "I have a funky web evaluation page at"
http://www.engl.niu.edu/mday/web/wmc.html
Alex "The Teach" said
http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/webeval.htm
"4 choices here for various audience levels."
Suzanne Van Wert-Branscomb said "Johns Hopkins has a site which is helpful and quite student-friendly:"
http://www.library.jhu.edu/elp/useit/evaluate/index.html
Links to Fake Sites
Will Hochman’s personal favorite ‘fake’ site is
This site has an Orson Wells feel to it and will delight any of us interested in spying, intrigue, and teaching students how "real" some web phonies (and creative writing) can seem .
Steven D. Krause offered the following:
"There were a couple of things I found sort of interesting to think about. First, it seems to me that the way decide on the credibility of all sorts of things-- particularly web sites-- is based on knowledge that we have beyond or outside of whatever it is we're trying to evaluate. For example, consider the Minnesota Coconut Grower's Web Site, which is at"
http://sunny.crk.umn.edu/courses/MISC/MCG/index.htm
"There's a disclaimer on this page (it's a teaching page), but a reader knows it isn't true because what she knows about Minnesota and its unfriendly climate for coconut growing. Of course, if you lived in another country and didn't know much about where various US states were at, this might not be the case. Or if you didn't know much about coconuts, for that matter.
Or consider a site like the infamous Bonsai Kitten, which is at"
"There is no disclaimer here, no effort to acknowledge that this is a joke. And of course, there are the gullible among us who will look at this site and start firing off angry email about how wrong it is that this practice is allowed to go on..."
"The other thing is is that these guides for evaluating online resources tend not to talk about one of the biggest problems of web page credibility, which is "the look." It's quite easy, as we all know, to make a web site that "looks" credible and real-- besides bonsai kitten, check out"
"as an example of what I mean. If it "looks" real and professional, web browsers will too often think it's real."
Final Thoughts
Nick Carbone wrote:
> I think what students need is advice on evaluation that is situated in the
> purpose and audience and motives of their research project. What often
> matters is not the so called bias of a source, but the role citing that
> source is meant to play in a writers argument. Most advice I see tells
> students if a source is biased, don't use it. What would be better would be,
> to tell students, find out how a source is biased, so you can determine how
> to use it fairly and effectively, where what counts as fair and effective
> depends upon your research project's aims, purpose, scope and audience.
Good point! It occurs to me that there are different sorts of
credibility/validity with sources. For my purposes, I'm interested in
students figuring out that a source written by the expert on a particular
topic carries more weight than an article in Seventeen magazine that quotes
that same expert--if the goal is straight reporting of facts as evidence to
support an argument.
Some of the discussion in this thread focuses on another sort of validity:
"real" sites versus "fake" sites, which truthfully, I wasn't even thinking
of when I sent out my query. In my case, all the sources I've offered my
students are "real," but not all of them are equally valid for the task at
hand.
What this has led me to conclude is that there's another level of complexity
I need to consider as I teach my students about using sources, and I that I
need to find a way to introduce them to the issues related to the real/fake
sources.
Many thanks both for the links and for the intriguing and enlightening
discussion.
Dan
danbutcher@earthlink.net