Information Competency modules for AH3 - Life Cycle, Gavilan College

Major Contributors of Information on the Internet

You'll be getting a lot of your information through the Internet, so it's a good idea to understand who is putting the information out there. This will help you decide whether the information is believable or reliable.

Major contributors of Internet information can be organized into 4 large categories:

diagram of internet contributers: government, education, commercial, and nonprofit

Each of these contributors uses a different ending in their domain name, the part of the Internet address between the double slashes and the first single slash.

.gov are government agencies, including 3 huge federally-funded national libraries.
.edu are educational institutions, universities, colleges and research institutions.
.com are commercial enterprises, everyone who is trying to sell you something.
.org are nonprofit organizations, such as the American Heart Association.

diagram with domain endings

If the address in the address bar at the top of the screen has an address like this:

then we can safely assume a couple of things:

Because of the .edu ending, this is an educational site, a university, four-year college, two-year college, or research organization.
Because of the berkeley designation, this is probably coming from the University of California Berkeley website.

This will be true even if the address has many more folders and files after this domain name. Remember that we are looking only at the first part, the part between the double slashes and the first single slash.

Think of the web address (URL) as directions to the computer on how to find a particular website. In this URL, we are telling our computer to:

Use the hypertext protocol (http)

Find the computer system with this domain address: www.berkeley.edu

Find a folder (or directory) on that system called departments

In that departments folder, look for another folder called nut

And finally, in that nut folder, look for a specific document called major.html

The specific document is always the last piece of a URL, and will usually end in .html, htm, or .php.

Examples of the four main Internet contributors

Information about the grand theories of human development could come from any one of these Internet contributors, and any one of them could be reliable, believable, current and trustworthy. Knowing where they are coming from is a starting point in evaluating whether the site meets these standards. Here are examples of the four different website creators:

First look at this website:

http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html

You can tell from the domain name that it comes from what type of organization?

There are no folders in this URL -- the html document is on the first level of the www.simplypsychology.org system. The specific document that will be displayed with this URL is operant-conditioning.html

Erase that part of the URL, to get back to the home page of this site. Click at the end of the URL, up in the address bar. The entire URL should become highlighted. Click again and your cursor will be left blinking at the end of the URL. Erase the folder. When you have nothing but the domain name in that address line, click the GO button.

Scroll down to the bottom of the home page, and click on the About Us button.

This website was started and is now maintained by Saul McLeod, a researcher at a university in England. Can you find the name of the university? He doesn't say if he is the only writer, or how he finances the site (who pays the bills). But because the domain name ends in .org, we might assume that it's not being funded by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.

Here's another website to look at:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/wxh139/bahavior.htm

Look again at the domain name.

www.personal.psu.edu

The complete URL is directing your browser to find this system (www.personal.psu.edu), then look for a folder called wxh139, and inside that folder, look for a document called bahavior.html.

This educational institute is not as obvious as our Berkeley example above, but we can still find out what school is putting up the site. Simply erase everything that comes after the domain name in your address bar (remember that bar at the top of the screen), so you are left with this:

https://www.personal.psu.edu

This is the personal part of the school's website, a place where students, faculty and staff can all put up information. What is the name of the school?

We can also find out whose personal page this is, by putting the folder name back onto that address:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/wxh139/

This is a personal website for an instructional designer at a university, and is one example of the type of information that educational sites are sharing. Others might be instructor pages, resumes, research findings, instructors' or students' personal opinions.

Next try this website:

http://www.crystalinks.com/piaget.html

From the domain name ending, what can you tell about the supporting institution?

This is another site that has no folders. On the main system (www.crystalinks.com), the browser should find the document entitled piaget.html.

Go directly to the domain name by erasing the /piaget.html in the address bar (http://www.crystalinks.com/) and see what you can find out about the creator of this website. One of the black buttons across the top is labelled ABOUT, which will give you more information about the author. Who is this woman and what is she trying to sell? Remember, most .com websites are trying to sell you something.

And last, look at this website:

http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/brp/research/constructs/self_efficacy.html

What type of institution is putting this page up?

This site has three folders that our browser has to look through: first find the system called cancercontrol.cancer.gov, and on that system, find the brp folder, and inside that folder, look for the research folder, and inside that folder, find the constructs folder. Finally, look for a document called self_efficacy.html.

This is an example of the type of information that governments (city, county, state, national) post on the Internet. This particular one, from the National Cancer Institute, a government agency, talks about the various health behavior theories.

In addition to individual government agency sites, there are three huge national libraries that we have access to, and that provide a wealth of information:

The Library of Congress,
ERIC, the library of educational research, and
NLS, the national library of science, for medical information, trials and research findings.

We will be using the NLS database (through Medline, for research results, and MedlinePlus, for the general population) in another module, so you'll have a chance to see the kinds of information they have stored for you.

Exceptions to the Rule

And there you have examples of the four big supporting institutions of Internet websites. Unfortunately, there are many, many more domain name endings, more keep coming out as the Internet grows, and lines of distinction between the different institutions are becoming blurred.

Look at this website:

http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm

Since this domain name ending (.ca) is none of the endings that we are familiar with, we can't immediately identify the source of the website. You might even think it's coming from California, because of that .ca ending. However, you now know a way to get back to the homepage of the institution, by erasing the ending folders and files of the URL in your address bar, until you are down to just the domain name:

http://www.usask.ca/

What institution is supporting this site and where are they located? In case you haven't figured out where Saskatchewan is, that .ca stands for Canada, not California.

This is the type of detective work you have to perform in order to find out the most basic information about Internet sites -- who is supporting them.