E-tivity 5: Evaluating Online Sources

Hi all!

Today I'm going to write something in relation to what we did in class last Wednesday. Basically, we discussed the topic of online sources' evaluation.

First we were asked to think about the questions we usually ask ourselves when searching material for different purposes, such as our final dissertation. As far as I'm concerned, I'm quite used to filtering information, especially when using the web. It's something I learned from the secondary school when our teachers taught us how to do appropriate research for our school-leaving dissertation. I usually ask myself who the author is, if they are reliable and have already written something authoritative in the past. If it's a web source, I immediately check when it was last updated and have a quick look at the layout. For instance, if there was too much colour, a lot of ads, and the language was very informal, I wouldn't consider it a good source. My second step is to evaluate the content and see how it is structured: ideas in a good source should be organized according to some specific criteria and should be clearly expressed too. The language is supposed to be correct, formal, but not too complicated to understand.

I used these criteria to evaluate online material as part of e-tivity 5. All the sources I chose share more or less the same features. Firstly, the author is known and reliable, and most of the times they have already written something authoritative. Secondly, the layout is clear and the content is coherent and well organized. The language is formal but understandable, even though sometimes there's overuse of technical jargon. Finally, the author provides the reader with useful links and a good bibliography.

What I learned from this activity is to be more careful and accurate when searching the Internet because you always find a lot of material, but not all of that is reliable. That's why it's very important to ask ourselves a fair bit of questions before making use of online sources. To sum up, mind the web!!!

Serena Zorzi