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Barbara Cagle is a Highly qualified, certified teacher for English. Barbara has had  websites up and running for over 10 years and uses websites in the classroom to bring students highly relevant and up to day information.  If you want to learn  about building websites there is a FREE resource you can access from one of her sites.  Click Here to visit the site now. 

Evaluating Information on the Internet

Have you ever considered how the widespread availability of access and use of the Internet can be used in your school, work and home endeavors or have you ever gone to the Internet for information for a paper you were writing, a project you were working on or for information on something you were considering buying?

·         According to the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education[1],an international association interested in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the use of information technology in teacher education and faculty / staff development,  it is estimated that over 350 million WebPages can be found on the global Internet.

The World Wide Web is a tool that empowers us, if we use it wisely. It can open a world of images and knowledge unlike any that has ever been available to the mass population and it can enrich our overall understanding of the world we live in. So, How can you be sure the information you are reading is valid information that is worthy of your consideration?

Esther Grassian of the UCLA College Library and would  suggest you ask yourself these questions as you browse through a site:

By what AUTHORITY is the information presented?

Can it be easily verified or is it common knowledge?

Who created the site or wrote the information and is the person separate from the webmaster?

Check the domain, what institution published the documents and does the             publisher list his/her qualifications?

How ACCURATE is the information?

Are you looking at a corporate site who may be biased ?

Is the purpose of the document to inform, teach, or sell you something.

Is there an e-mail or contact address and/or phone number to contact the author.

What are the author’s qualifications?  Do you know the difference between the author of the information and the webmaster who simply published it.

How CURRENT is the information?

When was it posted to the site or last updated?

Do any links work?

Is the website OBJECTIVE?

How detailed is the information?

What opinions are being expressed by the author(s)?

Is the page a mask for advertising?

Ask yourself, why was this written and for whom.

What is the COVERAGE of the WebPages?

Are the links (if any) evaluated and do they complement the document’s theme?

Is it a balance of text and images?

Are references supplied for the sources.

Does the page require specialized software to view the information and if so is a free reader available from the site?

Is there a fee to obtain the information?

To demonstrate the importance of evaluating the information you find you might consider a widely spread story about Winston Churchill that you may have heard. The story was that a Scottish farmer saved a drowning boy's life, but refused a reward from the boy's nobleman father.  The nobleman then offers to provide an education for the farmer's son.  The farmer’s son grows up to become Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.  Years later, the nobleman's son is stricken with pneumonia but saved by penicillin.  That nobleman's son is Winston Churchill

The Truth, According to the Winston Churchill center in Washington, D.C., is that this is a myth.  There is no evidence that these events ever happened.  Churchill's official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, says there's no record of Churchill nearly drowning or of his father paying for Fleming's education.  Churchill was once treated for pneumonia, but according to the center, not with penicillin.  This is just one example of information obtained from a website that was spread without verification and accepted by many as truth.

This does not mean that a site offering an opinion, or even a story, is a bad or unreliable site, on the contrary, sound opinions based on logic, research and study as well as personal experiences can be valuable to you in your own research, but be an alert reader and know where the facts end and the opinions or the story begin.

Develop a personal intention in the audience.

There is an increasingly broad body of good content to be found on the Internet and if you use the skills I’ve outlined here, you should find that any information you obtain from this valuable and almost unlimited resource will be information you can share and use with confidence.

Being an advocate of education and having set my sights on a career as an Instructional Technology Specialist in Education, I feel that this basic idea of verifying information is one of the most important practices I can relay to anyone who is doing research and taking information from millions of pages on the Internet.  

We all have a role to play and it is time we collectively move the power of the Internet from promise to practice; so if you are going to take the time to research a project, or do research on a pending purchase, take the few extra minutes to ask yourself, is this page giving me valid, current, and useful information that I can confidently share with others?

Works Cited

The Churchill Center.  “Churchill Facts.” N.a. http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1

Grassian, Esther. “Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources.”  UCLA College Library. Help Guides.  http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/critical/index.htm.

Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education.  Ann Thompson, President. Iowa State University. http://www.aace.org/site/SITEstatement.htm.