Unit 6 Week 12 Evaluating Sources Pg. 3

You've just been given a great deal of important information for evaluating web sources, and these techniques can actually be applied to your other evaluation tasks too.

Just remember that there are various guidelines available for you to use when evaluating your sources.

If you want to utilize a "scholarly" source, a source written by experts for experts, then you'll need to consider some specific questions: Is the language formal or informal? Is there a bibliography or a series of footnotes? These questions can be found in A Writer's Reference.

If you want to figure out how biased a particular source is, you might spend a few minutes "googling" an author or a publisher to learn contextual information about them. 

If you want to evaluate a web source you've got lots of things to look for--who is sponsoring the site? What does the domain name and the extension tell you? How recent is the information?

Questions like these can be helpful, yes, but it's up to you and your critical reading skills, ultimately, to make the best determination.

On the next slide you'll receive your Research Group collaboration assignment for this week. 

Work together to evaluate a source, and then write a 1-paragraph report about the source (as a group).