Website Evaluation Webquest

Now that you have completed this webquest, you should feel better prepared to identify an appropriate web source for your website evaluation assignment and a web sources appropriate for use in a scholarly paper.  Throughout the webquest you explored many websites for specific criteria. You could now go back and apply all the criteria to each website to gain an overall sense of the reliability of each of the sources presented in this exercise.

While in most cases you will want to choose a website that is as credible as possible for your assignments, sometimes the purpose of using a source might be because of its flaws or lack of credibility.  For example if you were writing a paper which compares and contrasts media images of women, you  may have a mixture of credible sources and sources that lack credibility and the point of citing the sources that lack credibility would be to discuss that lack of credibility. Similarly, news articles might stimulate discussion in a scholarly paper -- a discussion that you would back up with credible sources.

The most important outcome that you need to demostrate when you choose sources for an assignment is an ability to recognize the purpose of a source, discuss its credibility, and use it appropriately in that context. The website evaluation assignment does not require you to analyze only credible sources. It only requires that you analyze a web article correctly and if it is not credible that you identify where it is lacking in your responses to the assignment questions.

Good luck in your assignments. Please do not hesitate to contact your instructors if you require futher clarification.