Doing the research : Selecting sources

Web literacy: Challenges and opportunities for research in a new medium

Madeleine Sorapure, Pamela Inglesby and George Yatchisin (University of California - Santa Barbara)

Abstract

Student researchers are turning in increasing numbers to the World Wide Web as a resource, though not necessarily with an understanding of how to assess the reliability or value of the information they find there. At all stages of the research process, but especially at the assessment stage, the Web poses challenges that writing teachers should address explicitly in guiding students to become skillful and discerning readers of Web sites. The Web literacy student need involves an ability to manage the diverse and largely unfiltered content of the Web and an attentiveness to the information conveyed in a site's nontextual features, most notably its images, links, and inter-activity. Teaching students this literacy means supplementing the evaluative criteria traditionally applied to print sources with new strategies for making sense of diverse kinds of texts presented in hypertextual and multimedia format. Assessing the value of information offered at Web sites can enhance students' research and writing skills and is also an important step in educating students to be critical users of the Web and the Internet.

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