I've done some work on how flawed the Internet-literacy strategy of teaching people to "evaluate the URL" is when it comes to what I refer to as cloaked sites, that is, sites that are intended to disguise a particular political agenda. For example, the site at the URL "martinlutherking.org" appears to be tribute site, but is in fact published by white supremacists. The young people I interviewed for my research (ages 15-19) were often fooled by the site and the strategy of "evaluating the URL" didn't help them. In fact, it actually made it more difficult to figure out that the site was cloaked. So, in terms of criteria, I argue that always being able to identify authorship of a website is crucial (if there's not an "about us/me" link, be suspicious). And, of course, critical thinking informed by an awareness the political landscape (especially around racism) is important as well. I also have a piece in the MacArthur series that Dan mentioned, (mine's in the Race and Ethnicity volume). And, I also have a forthcoming book, *Cyber Racism* (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). Hope this helps, ~ Jessie Jessie Daniels, PhD Associate Professor, Sociology Mercy College New York, NY -- http://www.jessiedanielsphd.com http://www.racismreview.com http://www.homelessyouthservices.org On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 2:13 AM, Dan Perkel <dperkel@ischool.berkeley.edu>wrote:
Not sure if this gets at "criteria" but the chapters in this book may cite others that get you where you want to go. They are all free downloads.
Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/dmal/-/2
I believe that there are a number of "web credibility" projects out there as well, but it sounds like you are aware of them.
Dan
Dan Perkel PhD Candidate, School of Information University of California, Berkeley dperkel@ischool.berkeley.edu http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel<http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/%7Edperkel> http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu
On Sep 11, 2008, at 9:04 PM, Fiona Bradley wrote:
Is anyone aware of recent research on criteria to evaluate online
information, especially if aimed at resarchers and students?
For many years, libraries have been providing guides to evaluating information on the Internet that asks students to look at the URL (is it .com or .gov? is it a personal or organiation site?), the published date, the existance of an author byline etc as critiera to evalute online information. These criteria are perhaps becoming a little too simplistic now to really evaluate a site and in many cases can be misleading – especially with the rise of academic blogging, online datasets, preprint archives, association sites etc which fall out of these boxes.
I'm having difficulty finding critiera that goes beyond looking at the URL, authorship and page design and which looks at appraising all types of information whether printed or online, and evaluating the quality of peer review, accuracy of datasets and statistics and so on. Is anyone aware of work in defining evaluation criteria that can be used by researchers, academics and students? I am aware of some studies of critiera for consumer health sites but I'm more interested in appraisal for the purposes of citing information in research or student papers.
thanks, Fiona Bradley
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