Site Evaluation

There were about five categories I looked at when evaluating whether or not a website is credible. 1. Who's the author? Is it a name you might recognize? Is it even listed? 2. Is the site biased in any way? Instead of giving you the facts on a topic, you get a sense of trying to be swayed one way or the other. 3. What is the context of the site? Even if you know very little about the topic you're researching, there might be some completely outlandish information embedded within it that you know makes the website unreliable. 4. Are there any citations that support where this evidence came from? Are the links from these citations to actually see the sources? And finally, 5. Are there dates that tell you when the site was created and when it was last updated? It's important to view all of these categories as a whole and not just individually. Just because you might be able to find the dates of when the website was created and who the author is, doesn't mean you can just ignore the rest of the criteria and completely trust the site.

While researching the four sites, there were two that I felt could easily identify were not credible while the other two took a bit more digging. Take for instance the tree octopus website. I couldn't find an author or citations (just a long list of books about tree octopi) and it was last updated on the day that it was created. All the put aside, the mere context of a tree octopus should allow the reader to know they're looking at an unreliable site. The second site focused on Martin Luther King Jr., which didn't offer an author, citations or dates. Again, just skimming over the site showed extreme bias, where a part of the site discusses Jewish companies being promoters of "hate crime". Such a site shouldn't be taken as the truth. The Explorers site was difficult for me. While skimming over, I found authors with information about them, links to references and when the site was last updated. Then I actually started to read the information and found that the context didn't make sense (explorer in the 1500's getting his armor from eBay.com?) And finally, the DHMO site looked pretty reliable at first. It looked like there was SO much good information. I could find an author and the date it was last updated, but I couldn't find any citations to support what I was reading. What set me off was all the links to click on to donate money to "the cause". There were Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal logos all around the site, causing me to believe there was some bias involved.

This activity showed me that sometimes you have to do a little digging in the right places to find out whether or not you can trust the sources you are looking at. In a time where technology is becoming increasingly prevalent in our schools, we need to make sure our students know that you can find great information online, but that you need to know how to filter out the good sites from the bad.