Internet Assessment
The purpose of this exercise is to have you begin to think critically about the sources that you may encounter on the internet during your research. As you are probably aware, anyone anywhere can put just about anything on the internet. The job for you as researcher is to determine what should be used in a scholarly upper-level research paper and what should not. The quality and authority of your sources will have a direct bearing on your final essay mark, as research is an important component of the mark.
What you need to do for the next class is to prepare a two page summary of the material contained on the following sites. The purpose of this exercise is for you to create your own template of criteria which can be applied to any of the websites that you encounter in your research. Be certain to bring your template to class as we will first divide into smaller groups to discuss our individual criteria and refine where necessary the template, after which we will be discussing the template as a class. This is an important exercise, for as researching historians you need to think about your sources wherever they are found.
Rutgers University: Evaluating World Wide Web Information
I will want to look at your individual templates at the end of class.