[Air-L] Research on critical evaluation of internet information?

[Jessie Daniels]

I've done some work on how flawed the Internet-literacy strategy of teaching
people to "evaluate the URL" is when it comes to what I refer to as cloaked
sites, that is, sites that are intended to disguise a particular political
agenda.   For example, the site at the URL "martinlutherking.org" appears to
be  tribute site, but is in fact published by white supremacists.   The
young people I interviewed for my research (ages 15-19) were often fooled by
the site and the strategy of  "evaluating the URL" didn't help them.  In
fact, it actually made it more difficult to figure out that the site was
cloaked.

So, in terms of criteria, I argue that always being able to identify
authorship of a website is crucial (if there's not an "about us/me" link, be
suspicious).  And, of course, critical thinking informed by an awareness the
political landscape (especially around racism) is important as well.

I also have a piece in the MacArthur series that Dan mentioned, (mine's in
the Race and Ethnicity volume).   And, I also have a forthcoming book, *Cyber
Racism* (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

Hope this helps,
~ Jessie

Jessie Daniels, PhD
Associate Professor, Sociology
Mercy College
New York, NY

-- 
http://www.jessiedanielsphd.com
http://www.racismreview.com
http://www.homelessyouthservices.org

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 2:13 AM, Dan Perkel <dperkel at ischool.berkeley.edu>wrote:

> Not sure if this gets at "criteria" but the chapters in this book may cite
> others that get you where you want to go. They are all free downloads.
>
> Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility
> http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/dmal/-/2
>
> I believe that there are a number of "web credibility" projects out there
> as well, but it sounds like you are aware of them.
>
> Dan
>
> Dan Perkel
> PhD Candidate, School of Information
> University of California, Berkeley
> dperkel at ischool.berkeley.edu
> http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel<http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/%7Edperkel>
> http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu
>
>
> On Sep 11, 2008, at 9:04 PM, Fiona Bradley wrote:
>
>  Is anyone aware of recent research on criteria to evaluate online
>> information, especially if aimed at resarchers and students?
>>
>> For many years, libraries have been providing guides to evaluating
>> information on the Internet that asks students to look at the URL (is
>> it .com or .gov? is it a personal or organiation site?), the published
>> date, the existance of an author byline etc as critiera to evalute
>> online information.  These criteria are perhaps becoming a little too
>> simplistic now to really evaluate a site and in many cases can be
>> misleading – especially with the rise of academic blogging, online
>> datasets, preprint archives, association sites etc which fall out of
>> these boxes.
>>
>> I'm having difficulty finding critiera that goes beyond looking at the
>> URL, authorship and page design and which looks at appraising all
>> types of information whether printed or online, and evaluating the
>> quality of peer review, accuracy of datasets and statistics and so on.
>> Is anyone aware of work in defining evaluation criteria that can be
>> used by researchers, academics and students? I am aware of some
>> studies of critiera for consumer health sites but I'm more interested
>> in appraisal for the purposes of citing information in research or
>> student papers.
>>
>> thanks,
>> Fiona Bradley
>>
>> Information Services Librarian
>> University of Technology, Sydney
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