ESL 552 ASSIGNMENT 2: Advertising

In the first half of this assignment, we learn about how to evaluate Internet sites. Then we will go to three different Internet sites and evaluate them based on what we've learned.

EVALUATING INTERNET SITES Anyone can publish anything on the Internet. Some questions to ask yourself as you look at information are: Who wrote the information? Who is paying the bill to publish the information? Is there an inherent bias? Do the authors quote research that can be checked or repeated? How recent is the information? To find out who is supporting a site, we need to understand from where Internet information comes. Major contributors of Internet information can be organized into four large categories: Government sites: including 3 huge federally-funded national libraries Educational institutions: universities, colleges & research institutions Commercial enterprises: everyone trying to sell you something Nonprofit organizations You can tell which of these four categories is posting the information by looking at the URL, or address of the site. Here's an example the URL: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/weightlossdieting.html The first part, http://, tells the computer what protocol to use. The second part, www.nlm.nih.gov is the domain name and tells the computer what computer system to look for. The next part tells the computer to search for a directory called medlineplus, and within that directory find a second directory called weightlossdieting.html. It's the second part, the domain name, that tells us from which type of institution this document is coming. Fortunately for researchers, each one of the four big contributors uses a different domain name ending. Because our example URL has a domain name ending in .gov we know it's coming from a government site, and that they are problably unbiased about commercial products. Hint: In addition to evaluating the web document itself, it's sometimes helpful to look at the site's homepage to learn about the sponsor/author. To do this click on the location bar (URL) once and the bar should be darkened. Click again and you will see your blinking curser in that bar. Place the curser directly after the domain name and delete what follows the domain name. So in this instance, you would delete everything after the ".gov". Then hit enter and that will take you to the homepage of the site. Good places to look are sometimes lableled "About Us" or "FAQ" (frequently asked questions). Visit Sites 1, 2 and 3 by clicking on their underlined link and see if you can find information about the creators of the sites. Note: When you click on a link, your browser should open up a new window for the link. To return to this assignment page, just close the window by clicking on the X in the upper right corner of the window. Warning! You do not want to X out of this assignment page until you have submitted your answers at the end of the assignment otherwise your answers will be lost. In the boxes below, write an evaluation for each site based on the five evaluation questions.