Challenges to Teaching Credibility Assessment in Contemporary Schooling

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and CredibilityThis chapter explores several challenges that exist to teaching credibility assessment in the school environment. Challenges range from institutional barriers such as government regulation and school policies and procedures to dynamic challenges related to young people's cognitive development and the consequent difficulties of navigating a complex web environment. The chapter includes a critique of current practices for teaching kids credibility assessment and highlights some best practices for credibility education

Usability and credibility evaluation of electronic governments: users’ perspective

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.With the rapid development of the Internet and web technology, governments worldwide have caught onto this revolution and shown rapid development of electronic government (e-government) in the public sector. Nowadays, there are a significant number of e-governments that are accessible via the Internet and provide a range of information and services. However, existing research indicates that e-government still faces the challenge of generating greater users’ interaction in terms of accessing information, utilizing services and participating in e-government decision making. Among a variety of reasons for this challenge, usability and credibility have been found to be the key factors in users’ decisions about e-government engagement and need to be explored. This research attempts to evaluate the usability and credibility of current e-governments, focusing on specific e-government websites in the UK. This research adopted heuristic evaluation, which is based on users’ perception, to implement a thorough and in-depth assessment of e-government websites. In addition, to obtain a more comprehensive evaluation, users’ performance was measured in order to reveal the level of users’ interaction with e-government websites when they perform a set of practical tasks. The research design was a quasi-experimental, consisting of two linked experiments. Experiment 1 aimed to evaluate usability and credibility of the target e-government websites, identifying a range of existing usability and credibility problems. Based on the usability and credibility problems found, design solutions were proposed for each of the target e-government websites. Experiment 2 aimed to examine the effects of the proposed design solutions on the usability and credibility problems identified on the redesigned e-government websites. The findings of experiment 1 suggested that the e-government websites need to improve their usability and credibility. In particular, the most serious usability problems found in the target e-government websites lay within the areas of “aesthetic and minimalist design”, “recognition rather than recall”, and “consistency and standards”. In addition, the most serious credibility problems identified were within the areas of “site looks professional”, “make site easy to use and useful”, and “show the honest and trustworthy people behind the site”. The findings of experiment 2 revealed that the usability and credibility problems found in experiment 1 had been improved by the proposed design solutions. Furthermore, these improvements might increase the overall usability and credibility of the target e-government websites, making the users’ task performance better within the redesigned e-government websites. Based on the findings of the experiments, this research developed a set of usability and credibility guidelines. Each guideline addressed a number of the specific usability and credibility elements at the detailed level of e-government website design. These guidelines can be helpful to guide designers to develop more usable and credible e-government websites

Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility This chapter argues that understanding credibility is particularly complex -- and consequential -- in the digital media environment, especially for youth audiences, who have both advantages and disadvantages due to their relationship with contemporary technologies and their life experience. The chapter explains what is, and what is not, new about credibility in the context of digital media, and discusses the major thrusts of current credibility concerns for scholars, educators, and youth

Users' trust in information resources in the Web environment: a status report

This study has three aims; to provide an overview of the ways in which trust is either assessed or asserted in relation to the use and provision of resources in the Web environment for research and learning; to assess what solutions might be worth further investigation and whether establishing ways to assert trust in academic information resources could assist the development of information literacy; to help increase understanding of how perceptions of trust influence the behaviour of information users

Catalog of Approaches to Impact Measurement: Assessing Social Impact in Private Ventures

To inform action impact investors could take to measure impact in a coordinated manner, The Rockefeller Foundation commissioned the study of impact assessment approaches presented here.It is natural to hope to find a single, turnkey solution that can address all measurement needs. In this study we conducted a survey of impact investors and complemented it with seven years of experience in the field of impact investing to discover what these investors want from impact measurement, and conducted in-depth interviews with over twenty entities that have developed and implemented approaches to measuring impact. Our survey of existing approaches was thorough but surely is not comprehensive; however the approaches are a good representation of the current state of play. What we found is that there is not one single measurement answer. Instead the answer depends on what solution is most appropriate for a particular investor's "impact profile" defined as the investor's level of risk tolerance and desired financial return, the particular sector in which the investor operates, geography, and credibility level of information about impact that the investor requires

Credibility of Health Information and Digital Media: New Perspectives and Implications for Youth

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility. This chapter considers the role of Web technologies on the availability and consumption of health information. It argues that young people are largely unfamiliar with trusted health sources online, making credibility particularly germane when considering this type of information. The author suggests that networked digital media allow for humans and technologies act as "apomediaries" that can be used to steer consumers to high quality health information, thereby empowering health information seekers of all ages

Human Development & Family Website Review Form

This article provides a set of recommendations about how to evaluate human development and family life websites. There are two dimensions that need to be considered in judging the quality of web sites devoted to children and family issues-- information and delivery process. The most important aspect of the web site is the quality of the information. If the information is inaccurate and taken from biased or unreliable sources, then no amount of cleverness in delivery can make up for this problem. Determining the quality of information is a difficult and complex process, nevertheless, for professionals who are developing web sites it is important for them to develop critical evaluation skills as they review other web sites for possible links to their own work and as they make recommendations to other sources of information.unpublishednot peer reviewe

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Building upon a process-and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality -- primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies -- reveals patterns in youth's information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure