WEEK 6

Today's lecture was about searching and finding quality information on the World-Wide Web. The lecturer talked about the context of the World-Wide Web, The equality of the World-Wide Web, Evaluating Information Quality (IQ) on the WWW, Tips that can be used to find quality sites and then talked about the group assignment.

This week's workshop tasks were to go to ICYouSee page and read the strategies that they have for evaluating the information found on websites. We then had to describe what those strategies are and compare them to the "INCO 48" Web page and the "Good, the Bad and the Ugly' Web page and see if there are any other tips that you can find. The other task is to go to the "Reliving the Sixties: a Web Site Evaluation Assignment" exercise and look through all 5 of the topics and we had to choose 2 of which we were to evaluate using the criteria ACCURACY, AUTHORITY, PURPOSE, DETAIL & DESIGN and OVERALL WORTH.

When i went to the ICYouSee site, there were six suggestions that were offered when examining Web pages. Those six suggestions are: Make sure you are in the 'Right Place', When in doubt, doubt, Consider the source, Know what's happening, Look at details and Distinguish Web pages from pages found on the Web. Besides these six suggestions there are also certain criteria that should be used. They are: Authority - Who are the authors of the Web page or what gives them their authority?, Accuracy - Is the site accurate or are the Facts real?, Objectivity - What's the purpose of the site?, Currency - Has the site been kept up-to-date?, Coverage - Is the information the right one that you are looking for? AND Value - Was the information that you found useful? Below is the link to the site.
http://www.ithaca.edu/library/training/think.html

INCO 48 had the same tips and suggestions as ICYouSee but there were just a bit of extra tips.
The tips are the 'The Ten C's for Evaluating Internet Sources and they are: Content, Credibility, Critical Thinkin, Copyright, Citiation, Continuity, Censorship, Connectivity, Comparability and Context. The Definitions of the ten C's basically define themselves like 'Content' for instance; is this would be is the wether the content is good and is it reliable? If it is still not clear then you can go to the site itself for a better understanding. http://www.taftcollege.edu/newTC/Academic/INCO48/sec6-4.htm

Good, the Bad and the Ugly also had the same tips as ICYouSee but they expanded the definitions of the tips. They went into more detail about the Authority, Accuracy, Objectivity, Currency and Coverage but they left out Value. I think that the detail that this page presented gave a better definitions of the criteria and made it more understandable for the public. If you would like more information on the site, here is the link to the site. http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/evalcrit.html