Link: A Rubric For IT Analysis Papers.
Announcements often come a feverish rate and a high pitch. Grand new advances and radical new conclusions about technology and markets appear every week. And anyone who has observed this process for more than 3 weeks knows that a high percentage of the products announced never appear, and the bally-hooed trends piffle away. So how does one evaluate how much weight to give any particular story. Zed Shaw is a blogger who has attempted to list the criteria that can be used as "stop" or "go" signals in interpreting IT news.
This reflects, of course, the even larger problem we have in society, business and our schools as more and more info is put up on the Web with absolutely none of the editorial filters we used to count on to help sort the wheat from the chaff, and give us a boost in determining the credibility of writers and speakers. With no editorial structure, the wacko's piece appears right next to the Nobel prize winner's - and if you don't know that one is a wacko and one a Nobel winner - you have no basis to distinguish the relative reliability of the articles. We need more information at earlier ages, to help us fill the gap left by the avoidance of the traditional publishing system. Just as much as we need to know how a computer works and to achieve "computer literacy," we also need to know how to judge the value of the information we find - "information literacy."
(-- originally posted by Rich Bowers, Coordinator, Ohio IT Clearinghouse)
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