From this week’s reading, in Chapter 6, I found helpful information on how to evaluate your topic. It was broken down into three criteria’s; reliability, validity, and currency. Reliability refers to the credibility of the author’s information he presents. Validity refers to the truth behind the underlying information of the resource. Lastly, the currency refers to how current or recent the information was presented. These three criteria I find most helpful when getting information off the internet. Books, magazines, and newspapers seem to have more credibility than the internet. Anyone can post information on the internet, and most of the information sounds legit. For example, take Wikipedia. It’s an online encyclopedia that the public may edit. It seems resourceful, but the information is posted by many people, some credible, most not. If you use the criteria, you will find that Wikipedia is not a trustworthy, resourceful site. If you do take information from sites like these, you may end up doing more work to find the credibility on the material. Even when you do find a credible site, you still might want to research the author, as his or her background may be surprising. The author may have a background that can lead him or her to bias opinions or such things that would make a difference in the information given.
When I did my reading I found this information informative as well as acknowledging where I got my research from through oral citations, therefore I decided to write about that. Nonetheless, this information is quite helpful for evaluating your speech's topics. I agree with you that looking for credible sources is a huge part of the research process, and if your source is not credible you can be lending your audience the wrong information. I like how you listed what sources you go to to find credible information because you are right sources such as Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, therefore presenting false facts. By going through the three steps explained in the book: reliability, validity, and currency you can easily eliminate some sources.
ReplyDeleteWhat you chose as a concept to talk about is one that I think will come in handy for all of us throughout this semester. Reliability, validity and currency are three ways to choose a website based on how credible it is. One thing that I always seem to have trouble with finding is the reliability of how valid a webpage may be. Because I do not always know what the credentials should be in order to deem this author an expert on the subject. Currency is something that I think we can usually find fairly easy on the internet. There are so many ways for authors to constantly be putting up very current information. You made a good point about Wikipedia. Because anybody can edit the website, you may end up having to do a lot of extra work in order to determine the reliability and validity of a website.
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