3/11: Source Reliability Part 2

Hi Students!

The focus of today's class will be to evaluate some of the sources that you submitted for recommendation during our last class. I selected 7 articles that need to be evaluated by working with a peer.

In order to evaluate the sources, you will need to do the following:

1. Open the Choosing Sources Chart

2. Pair up as follows and briefly skim the articles in the corresponding order under your names:

     Ting & Jia: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7

     Mengyan & Robin: 7-1-2-3-4-5-6

     Stella & Eugene: 2-3-4-5-6-7-1

     Ha Young & Isaac: 3-4-5-6-7-1-2

     Yerin & Seung Ho: 4-5-6-7-1-2-3

     Thomas & Eason: 5-6-7-1-2-3-4

     Wenzi & Xyza: 6-7-1-2-3-4-5

Remember that the sources can be describing our overall problem of inappropriate waste disposal and the others can be about our specific solution (deep geological disposal) such as critiques or actions for improvement.

3. Complete the chart according to what is being asked:

*Relevancy: You will learn more about this in upcoming modules, but the idea is that the article is related and beneficial to our topic and could be used somewhere in the paper.

*Purpose: Some of the sources we find may seem relevant to the topic, but have objectives that are different to those of our paper or particular solution that we have chosen.

*Readability: This is not an actual criteria, but for the purposes of this class, it is very important. As we have discussed in class, we need to understand what it is we are reading. The majority of articles will be a "2" (difficult), but we will want to avoid a "1" (extremely challenging).

*Finding Connections: While skimming and scanning the articles, can you find connections among them? If two or more sources focus on similar main ideas, this will help our writing in the future.


4. Decide on the final 3 sources you (as a pair) recommend by highlighting the numbers on the first column to the left. Upload to one of your Dropbox accounts.

5. Open a MS Word document and write a Reliability Statement. When writing these couple of sentences, you should keep in mind that the purpose is NOT to evaluate a source's usefulness. Instead, it defends the reliability/credibility of the source. The reliability statement should justify why the source has been considered reliable enough to include on the research paper. If the source has weaknesses, you should mention such weaknesses in the statement, and provide a defense of its strengths to justify its use. Upload the document to one of your Dropbox accounts.

Homework:

Continue to search for/evaluate 5-6 sources for your IRP Topic. You should have 5-6 Full Text PDF files uploaded to a folder named IRP Sources inside your Dropbox account by Friday, March 15, 2013 at 11:59 p.m.

Thanks!!

--Lisa