This page summarizes the life and work of influential American psychologist and philosopher John Dewey. It discusses his proposals for educational reform, including eliminating class distinctions and basing education on practical skills and experiences. It also evaluates the reliability of the Wikipedia page about Dewey using five criteria: accuracy of information, credentials of authors, objectivity, currency of content, and coverage of topic. The summary concludes that this is a reliable source given Wikipedia's editing policies and protections for semi-protected pages.

1. Validating a Web Site<br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey<br />Introduction<br />This web page is about the psychologist, philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey. He has been important and influential for social life since he also defended democracy.<br />Dewey proposed a total reform of education in which there would be not distinction between social classes. The reform consisted on changing the traditional ideas of teaching, learning, culture and order and on basing education in crafts activities and practical experiences. <br />He was also the forerunner of pragmatism, who discarded the idea of thinking just because. He said that thinking is the way to obtain answers we need to an urgent problem. He encouraged a practical use of thinking, which should have an impact on people’s life. <br />Criteria to validy this site<br />According to Jim Kapoun, Berkeley Library, Johns Hopkins University and Hope Tillman we can validate this site according to five different criteria:<br />Accuracy: This is related to the authors and the ways we can contact them, in this case, clicking on “history”, we can see who is behind the text, that is to say, the authors. Although we do not find their phone numbers or adresses, we can send messages to them through Wikipedia.<br /> <br />Credentials: related to the URL domain, this is an .org site. <br />You may not know this but The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia. <br />Objectivity: There is no advertising, that is why we can say the objective of this web page is completely respectable, formal and serious. It may have been created for academic as well as intellectual purposes.<br />The information is fairly useful but it can be difficult to read it because of specific terms, such as progressive populist, functional psychology, utilitarian ideas, monism, Logical positivism or adjudged.<br />Currency: It is updated regularly, the last update was on June 4th, 2011. The same applies to the links which are suggested by the authors.<br />Coverage: It does not require special software and its access is for free. There are also lots of suggested links so as to enlarge information and to help us establish validity.<br />Conclusion<br />Through all the points named above we can say that this is a reliable web page and also because it is a semi-protected site. We generally do not trust Wikipedia because we have the idea that anyone can change and modify the information freely. But all Wikipedia pages are protected, as there are certain requirements to allow people to edit it. <br />We also want to make a dinstinction between authors (who modify content) and editors (who pay attention to issues such as formatting).<br />As we said before, the formers need special requirements to submit data. Here is a little information about it: Users are identified by their chosen username. Users select a password, which is confidential and used to verify the integrity of their account. Except insofar as it may be required by law, no person should disclose, or knowingly expose, either user passwords and/or cookies generated to identify a user. Once created, user accounts will not be removed. It may be possible for a username to be changed, depending on the policies of individual projects.<br />The editors then are identified with the username or network IP address, and editing history is aggregated by author in a contribution list. Such information will be available permanently on the projects. <br />Editors using a company mail server from home or telecommuting over a DSL or cable Internet connection are likely to be easy to identify by their IP address; in which case it may be easy to cross-identify all contributions to various Projects made by that IP. Using a username is a better way of preserving privacy in this situation. <br />We consider that the following people may find this page worth visiting:<br /> <br />Those who are studying psychology: because they should know the thoughts of this interesting person.<br />Students of philosophy or already philosophers: because Dewey was the forerunner of pragmatism, and that means a lot in this area of study. Many philosophers are diveded into Rationalists and Pragmatics and he made a difference here. Actually many contemporary pragmatic philosophers use his ideals to continue working.<br />Students of TTC’s or even teachers may find this web page worth it: John Dewey had made changes in the educational system, and in the way teachers should teach. Namely allowing “creative disorder” when students are creating, experimenting and practicing. We teachers must know that learners have an active role and they only learn through experience.<br /> <br />