« How narratives persuade: By showing cause-and-effect relationships | Main | Can video games be more effective than anesthesia? »
December 09, 2004
Students and Online Sources
The Associated Press reports that professors and others are worried over students’ reliance on online sources and their methods of assessing the credibility of those sources. They find that students think going to a physical library to find a good source is often out of the question or thought to be too much work. And their choice of online sources may be poor: “For instance, 63 percent of students asked to list Microsoft Corp.'s top innovations only visited the company's Web site in search of the answer.” The article also partially addresses the apparent advantage that children and young adults have over older people when it comes to accessing credibility online. I wonder how credible the views in the article are: the small amount of hard data included was gathered in unreliable ways, the rest of the article relies on anecdotal reports that are not very convincing, and it doesn’t at all address the huge archives of academic sources traditionally only found in print that are now available to most college students from their personal computers. The article does briefly mention the new challenge web users in assessing the credibility of wiki sources:"Another potential minefield is the growing phenomenon of collaborative information assembly. The credentials of the people writing grass-roots Web journals and a committee-written encyclopedia called Wikipedia are often unclear. Nevertheless, some Internet users believe that such resources can collectively portray events more accurately than any single gatekeeper. "In many ways, the greater diversity of information is healthy." (Consumer WebWatch, part of Consumer Reports, which is quoted in the article, collaborated with the Persuasive Technology Lab on a web credibility study reported on here.)
Posted by at December 9, 2004 05:45 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://credibility.stanford.edu/captology/mt/mt-tb.cgi/17