More Information Literacy

To continue the reflection from the previous entry. . .

While the 3rd and 4th hour classes completed the website evaluation on the day following the lecture/presentation, 7th hour did not come back in to complete the evaluation for over a week.

Recognizing that this was probably too long for students to retain information that hadn't really been applied, we decided to do a review using a column of the webpage evaluation sheet before sending the students out to evaluate sites for their own research paper topics.

I decided to return to the Crystalinks.com website as a model for how to evaluate a web site. Prior to the class period, I looked up the website myself and looked for a topic that would link a general Google search to the page. For whatever reason, the term "Eskimo" caught my eye. I couldn't help but think, "What does a person with a degree in Metaphysics know about Eskimos?" Certainly my own bias about this topic influenced my perception of this website--a fact I shared with students later.

So, when the students settled down, we "Googled" Eskimos and proceeded to follow the Web Evaluation Sheet's directions. It was clear right away that these students did not know the same information as the students in the previous periods--What is a url? What does .com mean? How do you truncate a url? Who is the author? Why is he/she credible? Where do you find the publication date, links, etc? However, it also became clear that as we went through the evaluation together and they wrote the answers down on the pages themselves, they were learning far more than the students in the previous periods. It probably took about 20 minutes for us to evaluate the one website.

However, when the students finally searched for their own information, they definitely understood how to evaluate the sites far better than the previous classes. While there were still questions about the names of sites, page titles, and the differences between a sponsoring organization vs. individual author, there were far fewer questions overall about general webpage structure and purpose.

We had a good discussion about credibility and expertise. Is someone an expert just because they have a Master's degree or Ph.D.? How do you know if an organziation is trustworthy? What if they don't cite their resources? For example, one student found a website from a practice that claimed to specialize in a certain disease (I can't remember the disease name right now). They gave several patient case histories with general claims of how the practice treated and cured each patient. The student asked if she should be suspicious since there were no references to other experts and how they treated the disease--hooray!

At this point, it seems that most students have found at least one credible website for their research topics (as long as they have a topic--the frustrating fact is that two weeks into this, some of them are still dragging their heels on actually picking a topic--and we thought they'd be far more motivated when the were able to choose their own. sigh.). Now they are working on understanding online databases (Proquest, EBSCO, Opposing Viewpoints, etc) and finding reliable articles from those databases, as well as locating at least one book on the topic (if one exists--some students are researching topics that are so new, they can only find information online and in online databases). Next week, we look at evaluating blogs!