Week 6- Blog 6 Friday 4th April 2008 Morning Lecture:
In today's lecture Helen went through the lecture slides, as wel as through the new assesment (2), the group assignment , and explained what is expected as wel as briefly outlining the three parts. We went through the lecture slides, indicators of quality, stratigies for evaluating and principals to concider.
Tutorial:
Task 1: In the tutorial we were asked to visit the "ithaca" site and review the strategies for evaluating information found on websites.
- make sure that you are where you want to be.
- if in doubt, doubt it!
- consider the source, dose it appear to be credible?
- look at the details, such as the author, date, publication details.
After these first initial steps, to further critique you need to think about:
Authority: the authors or publishers and what gives them the right or expertise to write the information.
Objective: what is their point of view and is it bias?
Coverage: dose the site cover aspects of your research that you are looking for? Is the language of higher levels and is the information of good standard?
Value: was it worth visiting, would you go back their for information?
Text analysis: is the text free from spelling and grammar mistakes and careless errors?
All the above information is from ICYouSee Critical Thinking page, this compared to the information that I found at the INCO 48 which I didnt find as well put together and useful, the website at INCO 48 is neater and pleasant to look at.
Helen also told us to look at and gain tips of the http://lib.nmsu.edu/instruction/eval.html website:
I scanned the site for information and it was pretty basic and very similar to the previous two webpages. So there is really no point of repeating the information above.
Task2: In the second task we were asked to complete the "Reliving the Sixties: a Web Site Evaluation Assignment" on the ICYouSee website.
The first site i picked was D- "The Psychedelic '60s"
Accuracy: The information on the site appears to be very factual, well structured and researched. The webpage was copyrighted for 1998, but updated in January 2008 which leads me to believe that it is well maintained and new information is updated regularly.
Authorship: it gives details of the publishers and where they are from, which is a very good credibility point. And the fact that it was produced by a university also goes along way to help its credibility.
Purpose: the purpose of the site is to inform and update people’s knowledge of the sixties, it is in no way bias or pushing any point of view about the era.
Detail and design: the design of the web page is very well thought about with clear links to the specific topics about the sixties, the color scheme is very “sixties” with rainbow colored links. The layout of the webpage is very easy to use and to maneuver through, with the homepage having the links on either side of the main heading.
Overall worth: Descent page, all of the information was researched well and as it was recently updated which means it is well maintained and looked after, I would recommend this site to anyone doing a project on the sixties or if they need information about the sixties.
The second site i picked was E- "The sixties project"
Accuracy: The information on the site appears to be well researched, but completely useless. Another thing is that the site isn’t well maintained, it is completely safe to say this because the site was last updated in January 1999 over 9 years ago.
Authorship: the publication details for the webpage seem to be very clear and concise with contact details such as an e-mail and a postal address, a long with information about the company that designed the website.
Purpose: the purpose of the webpage is to simply inform people of today about some of the things that happened in the 60’s and also they have stories that you can read from other people that have visited the site.
Detail & Design: the detail and design is very well thought about, with certain things that remain the same throughout the whole site like where the links section is placed, and the color scheme, font and text size but is dated and a bit on the tacky side!
Overall worth: the web page for what it’s worth is out of date, it was published in 99 , and for example it is using the old school tacky black background with hyper colored text.I don’t know that it was worth visiting, for the simple fact that it is useless information.
Summary of Readings:
We were told not to summarise the readings for this week, but instead pre-read them because they will help us prepare for our group assignments.
