Week 5: Critical Analysis of Information

Part 1: MAPing Information Activity

After I looked at the Dihydrogen Monoxide website www.dhmo.org, I noticed that it was a “.org” or organization website and it looked official.  I did a “link” search using www.altavista.com, and I noticed that it had other .org sites linked to it and popular sites such as pbs.org which led me to believe that it was reputable.  After searching three different search engines (Google, go.com, and AltaVista), they all had dhmo.org as their first result and Wikipedia.com at number 3 or 4, but Google.com also had a list of images and YouTube videos.  All of the websites had advertisements.  I think this is because that’s how the search engines make money since it is free to use their services. 

Wow! After reviewing the www.martinlutherking.org site I was amazed.  I was sure because of the URL “Martinlutherking” and the .org at the end that this site would be a useful site to learn about Martin Luther King Jr., but instead it is a white supremacy site.  I really like using the site “easywhois.com.”  I will definitely add this to my “delicious” account!  Also, using archive.org helped me see the evolution of the website (another site to add to delicious). 

After doing this activity I, and trying it out on my own websites, don’t feel that confident at all about my past experience with web-searches.  I used to be somewhat naive to the content and the author’s purpose.  I will definitely start using these skills to find websites that are more credible. 

Part 2: Teaching Students How to Make Reliable Web Searches

It is up to the teachers to show students how to use the Internet.  If we fail to do so, history – or what the future of humanity will believe is history – can be changed because everyone started believing a lie, all stared by unreliable websites.  Good schools are blocking these sites from their networks, but when students are assigned homework they use their home computers.  It is important that students know how to search the web so they don’t use sites like www.martinlutherking.org for a research paper.

Part 3:  Delicious and Social Bookmarking

I was excited that this week our activity was on social bookmarking because I was interested in the subject, and I wanted to learn more about it.  I had heard of delicious.com in another ETEC class at TAMU-Commerce, and it sounded like a helpful tool.  In the past, I would lose my bookmarks because of a computer problem or I would use a different computer and not be able to access them.  Now, with delicious, I can have access to them whenever I’m online. 

The social side of these tools will help me as a teacher by getting other websites that are researched by other teachers.  I am currently doing a unit on ancient Greece, and I will use it to find sites that were “tagged” by other teachers. 

My delicious username is jcaldwell2000