Wishing

Well I must say that I am happy with the end product. There were challenges in the beginning. Once I decided what I wanted to do I sat at my desk for a while dumbfounded. Then, I dove in head first pulling website after website up. Big mistake. You can see from my initial postings that I was including websites in my posts without explaining why I chose them. Then, I had to backtrack and include that. I guess you can't read my mind over cyberspace anymore than you could if we were face to face. I would imagine that students make the same critical mistake. They fail to evaluate the website based on the five criteria for analyzing websites:
accuracy, authority, currency, objectivity, coverage...

So, needless to say, the pre-planning stages were shakey.

Since most of us graduated before the big bang of the Internet we are used to the traditional form of research. According to Callison and Preddy that high school students should be able to follow specific steps through the inquiry process. (The Blue Book, p. 90)

Regarding Evaluation and Selection, Callison and Preddy argue a high school student:

a. understands and is familiar with documents that have different purpose,scope,perspective,bias
b. is tolerant ofreview of information that does not immediately fit his or her personal perspective and seeks evidence from all perspectives before drawing a conclusion
c. can discriminate between important and less important questions and resources
d. explores information widely, and brings focus to the central porblem based on background readings, personal experiences and interests, and indentified the need for further research

(The Blue Book, pg. 90)

So, I suppose if I were the teacher / media specialist working with students on an inquiry project, I would emphasize how to analyze resources before getting started. Creating a checklist that would serve to determine the best resources before the research begins would be helpful especially for students new to the inquiry process.