Principles for Evaluating Websites - Stephen Downes
How do you know whether something you read on the web is true? You can’t know, at least, not for sure. This makes it important to read carefully and to evaluate what you read. This guide will tell you how.
So begins a useful paper written by Stephen Downes, July 16, 2005.
Stephen is based in Canada at the Institute for Information Technology’s Internet Logic Research Group. He has become a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata, weblogs in education, content syndication, digital rights and related issues.
Stephen is perhaps best known for his daily research newsletter, OLDaily (short for Online Learning Daily), which reaches thousands of readers across Canada and around the world.
Stephen Downes outlines, very simply and readably, his ten principles for evaluating websites. In summary, these are:
- There Are No Authorities – “You must determine for yourself whether or not something is true”.
- What You Know Matters – “You can depend on your own knowledge and experience”
- Keep Count – “You need to learn who to trust …Websites usually follow a pattern; sites that are trustworthy generally stay trustworthy, while sites that mislead you once will likely mislead you again”
- Facts and Appearances – “practice distinguishing the facts in a sentence from how they appear”.
- Generalizations Are Often Untrustworthy – “It is important to keep in mind that most universal generalizations are false”.
- Absolutes Are Hidden Generalizations
- Statistics Are Often Misleading
- Go to the Source - “ you always need to ask, are they talking about something else and especially what somebody else said or reported … websites that don’t offer links or references are less trustworthy. If you can’t find the original source, try searching for the same information… if people on different sides of the same issue agree on what was said, then it’s more likely to be true”.
- Motives and Frames Matter – “You need to know why somebody is telling you something as well as what they are telling you”.
- Beware Misdirection – “trying to get you believe one thing by talking about another thing”.
Downes’s final words
And finally, this is something that works best if you use diverse sources. Try to read points of view from different frames – after all, every frame has an element of truth to it. Don’t just go with the flow, be ready to challenge and question everything – even yourself.
The full article
Permission to use this article has been granted form the Institute for Information Technology, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
- Principles for Evaluating Websites, Stephen Downes, July 16, 2005