Review 15 Awesome Nurse Blogs to Follow and peruse the work found in a few of them. The work you do here with these blogs/websites/essays embedded in the linked site will give you some practice for the upcoming assignment you’ll do on sources you find on your own Source Evaluation and ultimately on the Annotated Bibliography portion of the Writing Assignment with Research with Annotated Bibliography.
Practice evaluating those sources using some of the terminology found in the lesson Source Evaluation Lesson and in the library session: What makes a source credible?
For this assignment you are evaluating nursing blogs. However, all the same criteria for evaluating any source type apply:
Authority
Who wrote it? If a secondary source, is the author an expert in the field? Does the author have academic degress or other expertise in the field?
Reputation
Is the source published by a recognizable publisher or affiliated with a university or other reputable organization?
Timeliness
Is this outdated? (If a primary document, generally not.) But a 1978 analysis of your topic may be incomplete because new information may have come to light since then.
Stability
Is this source likely to exist in a few years? Or might someone who’s not very educated in the topic come along and edit it? (Think Wikipedia.)
Significance
Does this source contain information with any significance, or is it more superficial?
Bias
Is the source neutral, or is there obvious bias? Inflammatory words, phrases, or a one-sided approach suggests the presence of bias.
Try to find some different blogs and authors within 15 Awesome Nursing Blogs in terms of style, credentials, etc… to practice the skills you are learning related to evaluating source credibility. Remember that different rhetorical situations call for different source types, so sources aren’t bad or good, just appropriate for different types of situations.
Read those posted by at least 5 of your classmates, making sure to read some evaluations of the same blogs which you evaluated as well as some which you did not.
Then, discuss what you find in this examination of your classmates’ work based on several concepts:
For your classmates’ posts related to blogs which you also evaluated,
What main ideas did you include which the other student did not? Which did they include which you did not? How do you explain this difference? Is it important?
If the evaluations differed, what were those differences? Discuss why you would evaluate the source differently and what that teaches us about audience and any other rhetorical concept applicable.
If your bibliographic entry for the same blog isn’t identical, why not?
For your classmates’ posts related to blogs which you did not evaluate,
Do you have a clear idea of what the blog’s main point was and how the author supported that main claim? If not, what do you need to know?
Do you find the source evaluation thorough, meaning do know in what scenario it would be used, when it would be credible and when it wouldn’t be? Explain.
Student Outcomes addressed:
Demonstrate information competency by locating, reading, and evaluating a diverse range of primary and secondary research materials (both scholarly and popular) in order to synthesize original ideas with those from appropriate sources.
Quote, paraphrase, cite and document sources appropriately in a consistent documentation style to maintain academic honesty and intellectual integrity. blogs to review is https://nursejournal.org/articles/awesome-nursing-blogs-to-follow/
