Week 5

After taking the Information Literacy Quiz, I found that I was not as knowledgeable as I thought.  I did, however, manage to retain some content that I was taught in my undergrad ETEC course.  All in all, I was not surprised too much by the results of the MAPping activity.  I have used the Wayback machine before to locate archives of websites that have crashed or been deconstructed, so it was not a new tool for me.  I liked the concept of finding the author/publisher of a website through www.easywhois.com.  However, I was not impressed by the format of the site or the manner in which your results were displayed.  To me, this website and the program that provided me with the publishing information did not have a reader-friendly appearance. 

I chose to dissect the All About Explorers website.  When I first looked at this site, it reminded me of the Webquest I made during my undergrad ETEC course.  As I used the MAPping steps to learn the Meta-Web information, Author information, and Purpose of the site, I determined that this site was an authentic teacher resource.  All of the sites linked to All About Explorers are noteworthy sites that I would trust for historical significance.  Even when looking solely at the URL, this website shows no signs that it is anything other than a company site.  The purpose of this page was to help teachers educate their students about the Internet.  A group of teachers collaborated to form this site.  I learned during my MAPping activity that this page does support Webquests and even provides instructions for the teacher on using these tools in the classroom.

Given that my mother, a former library research assistant, taught me to use only sources that I could trust early on in my academic career, I am extremely confident of the validity of the information I have used in the past – both in college and as a teacher.  She always told me that I needed to use noteworthy sources, such as academic journals or actual books.  Therefore, when I would use Google instead of the ERIC Database, I would use the Google.Scholar version to ensure that my sources were from a notable site.  However, I believe if we do no teach our students how to properly determine whether or not information is trustworthy, then we are setting them up for failure in the near future.  I mean, we do not want our students to be convinced that the world as we know it is a figment of our imaginations simply because the first website their search on “rabbit holes” produced pertained to the Matrix.  Similarly, we do not want our students to think that all calculus means is “U + Me = Us” because that video popped up first in their YouTube search about calculus.  The students of this technological generation take all information found on the internet as truth; as teachers, we must teach these students to determine the validity of each site, video, or link and justify their findings accordingly.  If students do not learn this vetting process in school, they will be sorely unprepared for college and the work place.

One major advantage to organizing information on sites such as Delicious or Google Reader is that you can access them from anywhere, not just your home/work computer.  This mobility allows for individuals to start a project at home and, then, complete it at work or vice versa.  I use Google bookmarks and Reader for my own personal bookmarks.  I have found that this is extremely helpful as I can sort the links into easy-to-manage groups instead of hunting for sites in the proverbial haystack of bookmarked links.  Should this concept be taught to our students?  I think so, but I believe it would be more applicable to subject areas such as English and History.  Teachers could use this tool to coordinate group projects and research topics.  By group projects, I mean that each member of the group would be a member of one of the aforementioned sites.  They would each research their given topic on their own, tagging each site for later review.  Group members could look at each other’s links/stacks/feeds and, once the information has been collected, work together to achieve the project’s goal.  When students are required to research given topics, students could compare their findings using social bookmarks.

You can follow me on Delicious at http://www.delicious.com/davisa312/.

In addition to playing with Delicious, I also explored Diigo.  This social bookmarking site does so much more than simply organize various links by tags.  When using Diigo, all of your information is stored in the Cloud for easy access regardless your location or electronic device of choice.  While you are reading online, Diigo enables you to highlight and make sticky notes directly on the site.  All of this information is, then, stored on the Cloud for future retrieval.  The feature I liked the best was the snapshot tool.  On Diigo, you can bookmark any website and provide tags for easy sorting.  In addition to bookmarking, you can also take a picture of the site; Diigo stores the page as both an HTML site and a picture.  Should the website ever take the information down or simply stop working, your saved picture will remain unaffected.  As I have lost count of how many websites have just disappeared, I found this tool to be the most beneficial to me.