EVALUATING INFORMATION FOUND ON THE WWW

One of the greatest challenges facing educators using the WWW is information overload and its corollary, evaluating information found.

Up until now, the text book and the teacher have been the source of information in the classroom. Students have learned to trust (or at least act as if they trusted) both. You cannot just trust the information found on the WWW. Some of it is misinformed, some is irrelevant, some is just plain wrong, some is really vile.

We need to be educating our children to be able to deal with the "Information Revolution." At least part of what that means is that we need to help them learn to be critical users of information. A good place to start might be helping them learn to evaluate information they find on the Internet.

It also seems to me we need to start thinking about how we can evaluate information we find on the Internet. I don't have an answer to this one. Do you?

Some things we think might be important to consider in evaluating WWW-based information are:

• What's the source?
• Who wrote the page?
• Do you know them or their work?
• Who sponsors the page?

Remember all that stuff about URLs -- this is where it comes in handy. You can check the URL of a website to see where and who it's coming from.

• Is the information on the page meaningful? useful? interesting?
• Is the structure of the information given meaningful? useful? interesting?
• What about the graphics? other media?
• Is the information on the page consistent with what you know? Is it consistent with itself?
• What does it link to? What is it linked from?
• How is the information given documented?

In addition, whatever criteria you use to evaluate educational materials in general should also be applied to websites.

Some websites that consider the issue (and provide various guidelines) are:

• CyberGuides at http://www.cyberbee.com/guides.html
• Hope N. Tilman's "Evaluating Quality on the Net" at http://www.tiac.net/users/hope/findqual.html
• Carolyn Caywood's Library Selection Criteria for WWW Resources at http://www6.pilot.infi.net/~carolyn/criteria.html
• Kathy Schrock's Critical Evaluation Tools at http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/eval.html
• USC's Infofilter evaluation template at http://www.usc.edu/users/help/flick/Infofilter/template.html