Week 12: Evaluating Information

This week we discussed the importance of evaluating information in order to see if it is credible or not. On Monday, we did an assignment where we looked at 21 news articles and had to decide if the information was true or not. I only got 15 of them right, what about you? Some of the fake ones were really easy to notice because of things like their titles. For instance, one article was titled, " Maine launches heroin vending machines". This one was obviously fake because it is just common sense that this would not be allowed because first of all heroin is an illegal substance. Another strategy to determine the credibility of articles was to look at the magazine that published the information. An example of this was an article published by the onion. These were just a few of the strategies to determine if the information is true. Some articles are not easy to determine because they might pass the quick eye tests and require more research to determine if they are fake. We even discussed an instance where even some of the biggest news organizations make mistakes at times. Time Magazine wrote an article about screens in Beijing which appeared to be playing the sunrise for its citizens since the smog was blocking the actual sun. This was actually just a commercial on the screen which happened to be playing in the morning, but this scene was quickly taken out of context by many news sources and the information spread like wildfire. This example showed us all the importance of making certain that the news we receive and spread is real.
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Wednesday we were tasked with finding one scholarly article and one that was not. The purpose of this was so we could compare the two in order to see if the non-academic one was credible. We evaluated the credibility by using the CRAAP test which stands for currency, relevancy, authority, accuracy, and purpose. I chose to use the research from my biology class, so I was researching ways to improve transportation to and from college. My scholarly article was written by a group of graduate students attending a college in Europe while my non-academic article was written by University Police at Stanford University. Therefore, it was credible since Stanford is a top notch college. It also passed the test because the information it provided was very relevant to my topic since it discussed some of the ways Stanford is dealing with transportation at their university. Overall, I concluded that both of the articles I selected were credible and relevant to the topic. The test was a good indicator because of all of the steps it went through in order to ensure it was a quality source. What did you think about the test?
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How about your sources? Did you have any sources that didn't pass the CRAAP test? If so why did it fail? As always thanks for reading my blog!