Establishing Credibility in the Information Jungle: Blogs, Microblogs, and The CRAAP Test
Document Type Article
Abstract
In this article, we locate blogs and microblogs, such as Facebook and Twitter, in the information landscape. We explore their diverse habitats and features, as well as the explosion of uses discovered for them by academic and journalistic researchers. We describe an approach to evaluating the quality of blogs and microblogs as information sources using the CRAAP test and show how a consideration of digital ethos in the application of the CRAAP checklist imbues the test with flexibility and effectiveness, and promotes critical thinking throughout the evaluation process. We demonstrate how the special features of blogs can be leveraged for rigorous assessment. For the purpose of defining examples, we focus on blogs and microblogs such as Facebook and Twitter, but we see our approach as having application across other yet-to-be developed platforms because of its flexibility.