The first thing I noticed about most of my sources is how positive they were about distance learning. That made me think about who the writers were, and I noticed that almost all of the pieces I found on the internet and most of the people testifying in the government document I read were people who were somehow involved in distance education. Some of them run distance education programs, some of them teach using distance methods. A lot of them are very up-front about being so pro-DL. Clark Nelson's "Annotated Bibliography" on distance learning, for example, says that it aims at "the practitioner who already knows DE is as good as traditional classroom instruction" (1). In the Senate testimony, the people who spoke were all there basically to argue for more government funding for educational technology, so their position on this make sense. In a way, people who are involved in DL know what they're talking about, since they have the experience. But they're also not likely to be very critical about it.

I also need to pay attention to who these people are. In the government document, everyone's background was pretty clear, and they were all credible sources. Most of them were educators or researchers, experts in the field. But even the students they had were experts in a way, since they had been on the receiving end of this stuff. The journal articles were all by college professors or administrators, and the journals all look very professional, no pictures, complete bibliographies, formal writing styles, therefore I think that adds credibility to these pieces.

1. With the internet things, its harder to know anything about the people, but there are other ways to look at their credibilty. For example, one document I found says at the top that it was "prepared by David Kahle for MIT course 4:207: Digital Communities." I don't know if that means that Kahle was the teacher or one of the students, but his project includes a long bibliography, his writing seems very scholarly, and theres an MIT e-mail address for people to send comments. I should probably try to contact him or look him up to find more about him. The article on "Issues in Distance Learning" was originally published in a journal, and it, too, has a scholarly writing and impressive bibliography. I've also seen the author's name listed in several other places as I've been doing my searching, so she sounds like a good source. Other things come from organizations, like Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications. I should look up information on this organization, but the "preamble" of this document says that it was funded by a U.S. government grant, so that sounds pretty reliable.
2. The pages I downloaded from the DL office at the University of Massachusetts work a bit differently. This is basically advertising, so I shouldn't expect it to be a a scholarly or non-biased, but it is useful and credible in another way shows me what an actual distance learning set-up might look like. It has a bunch of different pages, and example of DL really helped me understand things, and it would be good for my readers to do that, too.
3. Overall, most of what I found looks good. There was one article that I think I'll skip, because it was short and didn't say much. Interestingly, this was one of the pieces that looked more at the problems with DL, but the problems they listed were things like internet addiction and misuse of e-mail, and they don't say how these things affect distance learning. It's like they're general problems with the internet. So even though this piece is from an education journal and would be credible, it isn't useful.
4. The article from the American Association of University Professors also isn't very helpful, since it is talking almost entirely about how DL affects teachers. It's not that I don't care about that, but the issues they talk about don't really apply to what I'm doing. I'm trying to give a student's perspective. So again, this is credible but not really useful.

Evaluating Print & Electronic Resources

Working with Sources

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