Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Web Page Evaluation

It's no secret that the Internet is potentially valuable to students within most educational atmospheres. But if its powers are misused or misunderstood by students, than the resources it offers are useless. Thus, it's important for students to familiarize themselves, and be competent in evaluating web pages. The most common, but certainly effective ways for accomplishing this feat is by implementing the following components; that is, when students evaluate the validity of certain web-pages they should attempt to perform these actions:

1. Find out about the author of the page
2. Discover reasons for the pages creation
3. Evaluate if the web-page is up to date
4. Pay attention to the tone and style of writing on the page
5. Recognize what kinds of information are being provided
(are sources cited, is there a bibliography, other links, etc.)
6. Examine URLs to determine validity

Though the components above are concise, they seem to be the most common recommendations for evaluating web pages. There is, however, an abundance of literature available on this topic, which goes beyond the short list above. Some of this literature can be viewed at the following sites:

http://www.lib.duke.edu/libguide/evaluating_web.htm
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html
http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/pages/bones/lesson5.shtml
http://www.hu.mtu.edu/teachtech/search2.htm
http://www.mun.ca/educ/ed4945/web_eval_ex2.html

3 comments:

margie barker said...

I like the way you gave examples instead of listing the components of evaluation. You got right to the point.

msjblack said...

Excellent post. Thanks for the additional resources.

B. Williams said...

Thanks for the additional evaluation resources. The links are appreciated.