A Description of the Form Sections

Project Name: The project name labels the evaluated resource assigning it to a specific project. Asking students to assign a project name can also help them to think through their goals and to apply an identity to the project based on those goals.
What is the goal of your project? Here the students will enter the goal(s) of their project in words that make it easy to associate other information resources to the goal(s) at hand. Again, the goals should be behavioral. For instance, how do you want to effect:
  • what the readers believe,
  • their impressions,
  • how they makes decisions,
  • their knowledge, etc.
Resource Name: This is the name of the web site, ftp file, picture, graph, or map file.
Resource URL: Enter the URL or electronic address of the Internet resource being evaluated and retrieved so that it can be revisited at a later date.
Author's Name: Find the name of the person who authored or compiled the information. This is not always the web master of the page, and it may be necessary from time to time to ask for the author's name from the web master via e-mail. Another piece of information that might be valuable here is the author's home page URL.
Publishing Organization: This is the organization that maintains the web or ftp site, or who sponsored the publishing of the information. In many cases the publishing organization and the author are the same. Again, the URL for the organization's home page might also be included in this space.
What aspect(s) of the author's or publishing organization's background helps you accomplish your goal? This will be information about the author and the publishing organization that relates to the generation and publishing of the Information. This might also include special research in which the author is engaged or previous projects. Another example might be the mission statement of the publishing organization. It could also involve the research that lead to the information and other studies being conducted by the author. Students should examine this information and pull out aspects that are relevant to the topic and that lend credence to the information and its relationship to the student's information product goals.
Date of Publishing: Enter the date that the information was originally published. If it was published separately in print and this information is available on the web site, include this date as well.
Date of Last revision: This information is not always available. In some cases information web resources are not updated, just published. This information will, however, be important for time sensitive data.
How does the date of the information's publishing or latest revision help you accomplish your goal? In many cases the most recent the information is, the more valuable it is. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes, depending on the goals of the information product, information generated in 1942 or 1066 may lend it more valuable to the goal(s). In this section fill in any information about the date of generation, publishing, or revision that enhances the information product in relation to its goal(s).
Information Format (text, columnar, picture, movie): Enter the format of the information here.
How does the format of the information help you accomplish your goal? Information format is of greater importance than most people believe. In information rich environments, it is essential that information communicate itself as effectively as possible -- and this is format. Some types of information deliver themselves into the understanding of readers by being displayed in columns and rows of text. Others communicate better as graphs, and others as paragraphs of text. Another consideration in this section is the transfer of information from the Internet from one format to another. The information may come as tabular data, but you need to convert it to graph to more effectively communicate the information. All of these notes should be entered in this section of the evaluation form.
Paste information here: One of the advantages of retrieving digital information from the Internet is the fact that it can conceivably be accessed, manipulated, included in the information product, and published without ever being printed to paper. Data can easily be copied from a web page or other Internet tool and then pasted into this section. If you are using MSWord or other more sophisticated word processor (especially if you are using a Macintosh), even pictures can be copied from the web and pasted into the evaluation.
How does the content of the Information help you accomplish your goal? Why is this information important to accomplishing your goals? This is perhaps the most important part of your evaluation and should apply directly to the goals of the student's information product. Consider that this may be included in the product itself as supporting information about the information.
MLA-Style Citation Template: You want to get all of the information about your resource that you can at one time, so that you don't have to return to locate specifics for your citation or for other reasons. This section provides a template for a standard MLA-style citation. Simply highlight each element (last name, first name, title of the article, date published, etc) and then replace it with the appropriate information from the web page. When you are assembling your information product, all you have to do is copy this citation from your evaluation form and paste it into your product.