WebQuest
Website Evaluation Webquest
Process
In this section of our webquest, a series of questions will be posed to help you identify characteristics which support or detract from credible websites. While the internet has many benefits, one of its downfalls is that anyone with basic computer skills can upload information in the form of a website. Thus, as the image above suggests, authors on the internet can masquerade themselves with many faces. Some of these websites are very clever and pose as credible, but their real agenda might be to sell a product, or push a political or social opinion without presenting a balanced position on the subject.
Assessing a website as appropriate for scholarly use requires the ability to:
1. Recognize what kind of website you are reading.
2. Locate and interpret information about the author of the website or the organization publishing the information.
3. Locate another source which contains similar information to confirm the information in the article.
4. Identify when a website is playing on its readers emotions or is biased in its position.
5. Identify if the website acknowledges its sources.
Your instructors have requested you locate a "web article" for use in your scholarly paper and for your website evaluation assignment. A web article is one that contains substantial information on a topic and is produced primarily to be available widely on the internet with their intended audience being the general public. There are many webpages that masquerade as web articles but are not the type of source intended for this assignment. These source types include:
Homepages to websites -- these are the page you first see if you type in a websites home address. Homepages contain only snippets of information about that website and act as an introduction. Homepages lack substantial information on a specific topic.
News sources -- web based news articles can often look like they contain good information on a topic but news articles are written for entertainment purposes and often are trying to incite emotions in their readers. Most news sources clearly identify themselves as such somewhere on their page.
Peer Reviewed Scholarly Journals -- many scholarly journals make full versions of their articles available via Google search. Also, some give permission to certain websites to reprint their articles in full. You will recognize these sources because the articles will often have an abstract, will identify as coming from "The Journal of... ", and they may include a volume and issue number. If they are reprinted from elsewhere, the web page should make a statement such as: "This article was first published in The Journal of..." Scholarly peer reviewed articles are excellent sources for your scholarly paper but not appropriate for the website evaluation assignment.
Your first task in this section is to explore the 5 web links below. Identify which of those links would qualify as a web article source, a news article, a scholarly journal, or a home page.
Attachments
Description: Because anyone can post information on the web, you can often find information that is biased towards one opinion or another. Signs that information might be biased include: use of inflammatory language or insults to the other side, selling of a product, or information that contradicts itself or is inconsistent. Biased sources will only pull information from one side of the arguement or it will twist the words of the sources it cites or it will make sweeping claims of statistics without supplying a reference. The web links below all contain some kind of biased presentation of material. Can you identify the bias contained within these sources?
Description: Meeting the criteria for support requires references or corroboration. The page should have a reference list or acknowledge where its information came from in some way. Corroboration is the ability to find another source that contains similar information. Compare the two web links below which write about the same subject? Do they meet the criteria for support?
Description: "Author" can be defined in many ways in web articles. Sometimes the author is identified by name and credentials, sometimes the author is an organization and the material is screened and edited by an editorial board, a board of directors, or a committee, and sometimes the author is not identified at all or uses a pseudonym (a fake name or nickname). Explore the webpages linked below and identify the author of the article. It is always advisable when trying to find out the credentials of who is responsible for a web article that you also search beyond the page that you are reading and look for an "About Us" page or something equivalent. The most credible authors are ones that will be identified by name, will provide credentials, and contact information. The next most credible authors are organizations with editorial boards. And the anonymous authors? We know what we can do with those...
Description: Exploring the accuracy of a website demands looking at correctness of information, date of publication (more recent publications are expected to be more current and therefore accurate), and identifying the target audience. An article written for children will contain different information than articles written for adults and will therefore have different expectations of detail and comprehensiveness. When identifying date of publication, consider that many articles might display multiple dates. Be wary if the website displays the current date. Some websites display the current date by default. Be more wary of websites that have no date. A website without a publication date leaves its timeliness and correctness in doubt. Examine the 3 weblinks below and identify their date, target audience, and form an opinion about their completeness/comprehensiveness.
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