Enter the Blog

This blog was created as part of my studies - MTeach (teacher librarian) -hopefully here you may find some musings on education, libraries, life and studying along with generally witty and insightful comments (if i can manage any!).

Please add comments along the way. I'll be glad for any input, especially from fellow students and library lovers

Kylie




Friday, August 17, 2012

ETL501 assignment 1

This week it's full on assignment time - the main thrust is to look at criteria to evaluate websites. Part of the assessment was critically evaluating 2 criteria. In some ways the terminology, number of website evaluation guides and the concept of what constituted a set of criteria was harder conceptually than the actual evaluation we were required to do.

Partly this was due to the fact the assessment was open to interpretation about if we were analysing criteria for students to use or criteria for teacher-librarians. It was further complicated by authors such as Schrock who has the 5Ws - which are mainly directed at students, then also has a series of survey checklists (which look a lot like criteria) that are developed for both students and teachers and then also has her ABCs of website evaluation which looks like 26 criteria!!

Our lecturer suggested that partly the confusion on forums is a result of MASS (mature Age Student Syndrome) I think I have to agree - sometimes i'm quite clear about what I'm doing then read a post and am totally confused and unsure.... anyway...

In the end I evaluated Herring (2011) and ALSC (1997). Herring's strength is ultimately in that it is designed for teacher-librarians and puts education first, however, I think that his technical criteria are underdeveloped. Conversely the ALSC is strong on technical but weak on content and education. My position is that there is no definitive set of criteria. To make any evaluation worthwhile both the learners and educational context need to be considered and that means adjusting some of the criteria when looking at achieving a particular knowledge construct or product.



Schrock, K. (2002-12). Critical Evaluation of a Website: websites for Use by Educators. Retrieved http://kathyschrock.net/eval/pdfs/evalteacher.pdf
Herring, J. (2011). Improving Students’ Web use and Information Literacy: A Guide for Teachers and Teacher Librarians. London: Facet Publishing
Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) - American Library Association (1997). Great websites for kids Selection Criteria. Retrieved http://www.ala.org/alsc/greatwebsites/greatwebsitesforkids/greatwebsites


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