Week Eight 26th April - Evaluation & Authentication

Lecture
This weeks lecture was about searching and finding quality information on the World-wide- web. Justine told us about what information quality is and a bit about it. After that she talked about Information quality context: The World wide web and when she was talking about this topic she also talked about open protocols, open architecture and also about how no-one has control on the web. Then Justine went to tell us about a little bit of History of the World wide web. Evaluating information on the World wide web was the next topic that Justine went on to talk about. She told us about some principles to consider when evaluating information from the web. Justine also told us about some suggested criteria that other people have come up with and then talked about Beck's suggested criteria a bit more in-depth.

Five things I learnt from the lecture and the tutorial.
1. First thing I learnt this week was about the history of the web.
2. The second thing I learnt was about the how important it is to check out website and make sure the creditable. and how to evaluate them to make sure.
3. The third thing I learnt today was how to evaluate or have some idea about evaluating website to make sure there OK to use.
4. I learnt some way's of being able to evaluate a website.
5. Last thing I learnt today was how there are many different ways as to evaluating a website.

Tutorial
Today in the tutorial we were asked to look at some different websites and write about them in our blogs.
The first website I went to was http://www.ithaca.edu/library/training/think.html.
On this website they had 6 strategies to help help evaluate websites to make sure that they we OK and reliable. The first one is Authority - which implies that you need to check the author of the website and make sure that they a reliable person who you can trust what they have written. Second one is Accuracy - which is there enough support on the website to make it so it is accurate. Third one is Objectivity - which means does the author have both sides of the argument not just one side and not showing the other. Fourth one is Currency - this means is the information on this page current or resent or has it been updated. Fifth one is Coverage - this means does the website have the topic that you are researching in, is the information usable. The sixth one is Value - which is was the page worth while going to, was it informative?.

Then we were asked to evaluate a couple of website from this web address: http://www.ithaca.edu/library/training/think60.html.

First website: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/small/exhibits/sixties/index.html
Accuracy: I feel that this website has enough information to be accurate and has enough to back it self up.
Authorship: The author seems quite reliable as it is written by a University.
Purpose: This website does have a purpose of informing people about the sixties and what happened during that time period.
Detail and Design: The design and detail is very simple and quite plain. Though it is easy to find your way around the website which is good. The website seems like it is just a little to simple and plain even which the bright rainbow colours.
Overall Worth: The worth of this website I feel is very good. Has quite a bit of information on it and it is informative like a website should be.

Second website: http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/
Accuracy: I don't feel that this website has enough support information to make it accurate don't really trust it. It hasn't been updated since 1999 so the information is quite correct to now.
Authorship: It doesn't say who the author of the website is though it does have contact details for to get in contact with them just doesn't say there name. Wouldn't really trust the site because of this.
Purpose: This site has a purpose of to inform people about the sixties and other things.
Detail and Design: Very plain and simple again it lacks something. It is easy to get around the page and get back etc.
Overall Worth: The worth of this website is good but it doesn't really grab your interests. It doesn't have very much information about the sixties, its more stories, poetry, and resources.
Readings
All the readings this week are quite similar on what they are trying to get across to the reader. They all have ways of how to evaluate a website. All the ways vary from each other but there all about the same principles.

That's all for this week. See next week for more.

Brittany