Primrose Road

I developed an assignment for my College Writing students that will (I hope) teach them to start separating the crap from the non-crap on the Internet. Internet sources are, in my view, just fine if you're writing about a current issue, as long as you've got some lit review skills in your utility belt and are armed with several peer-reviewed journal articles as well.

Sorting out the Hyper-Crappy from the Slightly-Less-Crappy on the Internet:

Students will work in groups (3-5 students each) and present their findings during class.

Go to the Learning Annex (http://www.learningannex.com) page and select “Online Classes.” (You may need to select a city, and then go back to the “Online Classes” link a second time.) Choose an instructor with the title “Dr” before his or her name or the letters “Ph.D.” after his or her name (i.e. the teacher of the Past Life Regression course). Be prepared to present your answers to and discuss your thoughts on the questions that follow. Also, please tell us to what degree you believe the instructor you chose can be considered a reliable source of information.

1. Use Dissertation Abstracts Online to search for the instructor you’ve chosen. Is (s)he listed there? If so, on what did (s)he write his or her dissertation? If not, what are some possible reasons why (s)he is not listed there?

2. Check Lexis-Nexis and other relevant databases for articles by the instructor published in peer-reviewed journals. Were you able to find any articles? If so, what did the instructor research/write about?

3. Find the instructor’s personal homepage (most of them have one). Is the instructor forthcoming about where (s)he got his or her degree? (How) does the instructor describe his or her educational background?

4. If the instructor does not tell visitors to his or her website where (s)he got his or her degree, search the web to see if you can discover where the degree is from. Then visit the school's website: is the school legitimate or a "diploma mill"? How can you tell?

5. Search for web pages that reference the instructor. Is there a shared theme to these pages? How reliable do pages that reference the instructor tend to be?

A comment from one of my students: "So it's legal to put the letters 'Ph.D.' after your name even though you don't have a legitimate degree? That's incredibly unfair to people who've worked hard to earn a real doctorate."

Well said.