Analyzing online information sources...

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How can we effectively evaluate online information? Certainly, it is not as easy as it seems...

Browsing through the three websites Sarah suggested us, I’ve become aware of how important it is to learn how to evaluate the huge amount of information we daily find on the Internet! So what criteria should we use to distinguish good information from bad? How can we get out of such a big mess!?
After spending some time reading the tips of the University of Essex, I’ve come across a lot of useful suggestions on how to work out a method to evaluate online resources! Here is what I’ve come up with…
Well, if we have to do some research for our next thesis, a good way to start with is asking ourselves: where should we start looking? Is the information we are looking for only retrievable in the Internet? If this is the case, what we need is a good search engine…so we should forget Google or AltaVista as they give far too much information which might be misleading; in this case, what we need is a meta search engine (such as dogpile, search) or a specialized search engine (like Google scholar), which can refine the information retrieved in a more effective way! :-) Surprisingly, I found out that the University of Essex provides its students with free online services (like Intute), thanks to which they have access to the best web resources for education and research...great, isn't it?!

Moreover, what we have to be careful in evaluating the quality of a website is the authorship, i.e. who is the author, what are his credentials and if he/she had past writing experience in the field: when writing my thesis this was one of the first things I checked in order to be sure that what I found was trustworthy and at the same time worth reading.
A criterion I’ve always followed is that of evaluating the credibility of a website as well: in each new website we come across we should check if the home page displays the name and the logo of the institution or organization who provided the information, and if the website is frequently reviewed by the editors. Therefore, it is always important to have a look at when the information was published and when it was last updated. So we’d better not use undated sites if we are looking for recent information! ;-) In addition, we should be capable of verifying the kind of information we are retrieving, i.e. if it is based on facts or on opinions, which is not always easy to establish when reading through online material.

One think I didn’t pay attention to was the quality of the inner organization of a website: the information provided in the homepage should be easily accessible to everyone, even to the more inexpert people; moreover, a website should have external links which can help you retrieve more information about the topic of interest to you, as well as an internal search engine would be useful for the websites which contain a huge amount of information, so that more relevant material can be recovered. In addition, the content of a website should be as complete and accurate as possible.
The criterion of peer-evaluation was not unknown to me: anyway, I think it is essential in order to make sure of the quality of the information presented...Actually, I may trust more a website which has been highly rated than one which is not! ;-)

That’s all for now,

Bye girls, see you on Monday!