Challenge 3: Online Research

Welcome to challenge three! Only twenty more before you get that awesome prize!

So the last challenge focused on websites that can help prove a rumor true or false. But what about academic research? Can you use the internet to write a school paper?

First off, let me start by saying that I do not advocate writing a paper with just internet sources. However, just like there are a multitude of print sources that you can use in research, there are many electronic sources that can provide more depth to your research, and the internet can hold far more information than just our reference section, or any library’s reference section for that matter. How many times have you had a patron come in looking for something we just don’t have any information on? Or the entire seventh grade is writing papers on inventors and we only have one book? What if they were assigned the inventor of the ballpoint pen, and all we have is a tiny paragraph of information for them?

Many teachers do not allow their students to use online sources in their research. This is probably to ward off twenty papers written (or copied and pasted) entirely from wikipedia. But I think that teachers do students a great disservice when they block out internet sources entirely. In a perfect world, students would be given instruction on how to evaluate web sites so they could responsibly use online sources. In the meantime, could you help a patron find reliable web sources?

Web Based Internet Evaluation - The University at Albany has an excellent interactive tutorial on evaluating webpages. The focus of the site is on research for college papers, but many of these rules apply to all research, whether for fifth graders or twenty-five year olds.

Evaluating Internet Sources and Sites - The Purdue University Library provides a less interactive but shorter tutorial. This is a good site to go back and refresh your memory later.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly or Why it's a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources - This one is my favorite, and your challenge for today. On this page, they provide a link to a good website, a not so great website, and a website you should never, ever use for research. Read through the tutorials above and then do the same thing for a topic of your choice. Pick a topic, do a websearch and see what comes up. Evaluate the results, and post in your blog a link to a good website for researching your topic, an okay website (remember, the information here isn't necessarily incorrect, just not appropriate for use in a research paper), and an absolutely awful website. The worse the better! Make sure to explain why each site is what you say it is.

Bonus link:

In late 2005, Scientific Journal Nature, did a study comparing Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia Britannica. Comparing science articles, the Journal discovered that while Wikipedia had an average of four errors per article, the Encyclopedia Britannica had an average of three. NPR has an interview with a Nature reporter here.