Asia EdNet Tutorial - Module 2
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But is it any good?
Evaluating Internet sources |
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Can we trust Internet sites? 
The short answer is that we can trust some sites not at all, and some a lot more than others and we must evaluate every site before using it. Anybody with access to the technology can publish anything on the Internet. Misinformation can be a big problem for teachers and students.
Task 2 - Thinking about evaluation criteria
Write a list of suggested criteria for evaluating the quality of an Internet site.
At this stage, just think about the site in relation to adult readers. We will consider the suitability of sites for student access later.
 Need some help?
Some other evaluation criteria
A good general article about the evaluation of Internet resources is by Jack Solock of the Internet Scout Project. Read the article for yourself (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/addserv/toolkit/enduser/archive/1996/euc-9611.html).
You may want to print out the article for easier reading by clicking on the 'Print' button at the top of the window that contains the article.
(The Internet Scout Project (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/current/) at the University of Wisconsin locates and evaluates high quality Internet sites for the education community.)
Compare Solock's ideas with those of the Internet Detective tutorial (http://www.netskills.ac.uk/TonicNG/cgi/sesame?detective), developed by the Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education (DESIRE) Consortium from the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK.
(NOTE: You will need to log-in to access the Internet Detective site. If you wish, you can register your own details to get your own log-in name, or else you can log-in as 'asia-ednet' in the form provided. Once you have logged-in, select 'Criteria' in the left-hand menu.)
Task 3 - Essential evaluation criteria
Print out  this table. Using the Solock article and the Internet Detective tutorial, summarise the two most important questions that should be asked in each of the criteria, 'Content', 'Access' and 'Design', when evaluating an Internet site.
Note that Solock's three headings ('Content', 'Access' and 'Design') are similar to the Internet Detective's ('Content', 'Process' and 'Form' respectively).
Add any other criteria of your own that you think are important.
Need some help?
How do the studies of Asia learning emphases fit in with these criteria?
Some people have attempted to evaluate sites using a numerical scoring sytem for various attributes. This practice is not recommended. No matter how accessible or user friendly a site may be, nothing can compensate for the fact that it contains inaccurate information. Assess each Internet site on its individual merits.
Here are some hints on using a website address to help you to assess a site.
There is an excellent list of questions to ask when evaluating a website (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html) available from the University of California at Berkeley Libary.
Task 4 - Assessing sites
Return to two other Internet sites you investigated in Module 1 (or two other sites of your choice) and evaluate each site according to the evaluation criteria you developed in Task 3.
For each site, write a note for a colleague in which you explain:
- why you do or do not recommend the site;
- how you believe the site could be used in the classroom, and at what level(s).
You can print out this table to help you with this.
More information
The evaluation of Internet sites is a vast topic. If you are interested in pursuing it, you could follow some of the links collated by Alastair Smith in a section of the WWW Virtual Library concerned with the topic (http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm).
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