Another excellent site. www. tokugawa-art-museum.jp/ This site is in Japan and is a museum dedicated to the Tokugawa family. There are several collections represented as they appear in the museum and you can "tour" them via the website.

I posted a website on another thread already but since this one is here too...

Mr. Dowling's electronic passport is a website made and designed for kids. If you click on the Chinese History link, you get a lot of information about Ancient, Medieval, through Modern China. Some topics of interest that I scanned were for Ancinet China ; Confucius, The Legalists, and the Great Wall. But it even talks about Silk Road, Marco Polo, Boxer Rebellion, etc.

http://www.mrdowling.com/613chinesehistory.html

Hi Karen,

Not to worry -- this is exactly what this forum is for, getting feedback from our colleagues! How about it? What do you folks think?

Website evaluation

Here are a few tips for evaluating websites. We all know that in evaluation of a website it is important to distinguish a good site from one that is no so good. These days anyone can put anything on the internet.
The following is a quick review of the criteria for website evaluation that I have learned at CSUN.

Download time
Does the website download efficiently enough to keep you focused? Does the page download too slowly because the site is graphic –intensive?
Navigation Ease
Are you able to easily move from page to page? Do the majority of the links work with few dead links? Are the links and descriptions clearly labeled?
Appearance
Is the homepage design attractive and appropriate? Is your first impression positive?
Graphics, Videos, and sounds
Do the graphics, videos and sounds have a clear purpose and are they appropriate for the intended user?
Currency
Is the site updated on a regular basis?
Credibility
Is it a trustworthy source of information? Does it provide author and source citations as well as a contact person to answer your questions?

You might want to reproduce the following evaluation form and use these criteria to rate a site to see if it meets your curriculum objectives.

Wikipedia is created by users. Potentially having multiple authors/editors means that individual articles could be amazingly strong and complete or skimpy or, worse yet, plenty of questionable information.

Some college faculty, eager to steer students to resources they have more confidence in, refuse to permit students to cite Wikipedia. Below are links to articles discussing Wikipedia's virtues and shortcomings.

Peter Matanle, Japan scholor and AsiaMedia commentator

There is no doubt where the creators of "Wikipedia: A Techno-Cult of Ignorance" stand. The authors see Wikipedia as "the migration of the old left into the field of cyber-information."

Charles Allen, librarian at East Tennessee State University has written about the resource's reliability in "Wikipedia: All-Volunteer Instant Encyclopedia".

The journal Nature recently evaluated Wikipedia. The article requires access through a paid portal. Here are some snippets:

"However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.

"The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three."

...
"Wikipedia is growing fast. The encyclopaedia has added 3.7 million articles in 200 languages since it was founded in 2001. The English version has more than 45,000 registered users, and added about 1,500 new articles every day of October 2005. Wikipedia has become the 37th most visited website, according to Alexa, a web ranking service.

"But critics have raised concerns about the site's increasing influence, questioning whether multiple, unpaid editors can match paid professionals for accuracy. Writing in the online magazine TCS last year, former Britannica editor Robert McHenry declared one Wikipedia entry — on US founding father Alexander Hamilton — as "what might be expected of a high-school student". Opening up the editing process to all, regardless of expertise, means that reliability can never be ensured, he concluded.

"Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

"Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively."

[Jim Giles, "Internet encyclopedias go head to head," Nature 438, 900-901 (15 December 2005).]

A last word (at least for this post) on Wikipedia. Look at any entry in the encyclopedia (say,
Chiang Kai-shek). Often the entry will be amazingly detailed and offer names/terms in languages other than English (very handy in this instance are the characters for these). It will include links to other entries, photos, a bibliography of print resources, and links to other web resources. Pretty typical for a reference work, many might observe.

That's when Wikipedia offers something rather distinct. At the top of every entry is a "history" tab. Click on it to see a list of changes that the article has undergone. You can choose to compare one revision with another side by side. Many revisions fix typos or other errors, but others are substantive, dealing with how an event or action is characterized. Students might profit from spending time looking at and discussing this "production of history", this writing of history.

It would be great if forum participants would look at and comment on Wikipedia's coverage of a topic they know well.

To Clay and others,
Dan and I are working on a "choose your own story" website for our students. The idea is similar to the old choose your own adventure novels where you would flip from page to page. It is still VERY rough, so go easy on the critique. I just wanted you to take a look to see if this is good for the requirement of the website design.

http://63.215.91.212/school/

Also, we are going to design a lesson plan where the students create their own story of themselves, and possibly a story of a fictional character that would have lived in Ancient China. It's very creative and we hope it works!

So I took Clay's advice and went to this website looking for information on a subject I still feel a little more comfortable with than Asian history (but hey, I am getting there Clay!). I looked under The Articles of Confederation and liked the information I got although it isn't any more extensive than other places. What I really liked was the discussion link on the Articles of Confederation which certainly would help me go into the Articles more philisophically than factually. Might be great for an AP class but, alas, as with many websites way too advanced for my students to use. So....good for me to brush up on information but not something I can use in my class room. This is always my frustration....finding websites for my students and not for me.

Karen[Edit by="kllewellyn on Jan 18, 9:55:24 AM"][/Edit]