What an eye opener!! I thought I could read information online and decifer valid information from personal opinions and fictional material, but I was so wrong. I chose the webiste that had to do with the tree octopus just because it was something that I had never heard of and sounded interesting. By the time I finished navigating the site, I was convinced that I had learned something new. Although the only octopus that I knew of lived in water, this website had convinced me that maybe they could now live in trees in rainforests. The website even had pictures and video to prove that the tree octopus was real. How foolish of me.
This activity did teach me to pay more attention to the makeup of an URL. For instance if an URL has a tilde ~, person's name, or % in the URL then it is a personal site. Also the sites ending in .net and .com can be purchased by anyone, so the information might not be as reliable as the information found of .edu or .gov websites. I always knew that you couldn't trust everything that you found on the internet, but this acitivity gave me tools to further disect the website and validity of its information just by looking at the URL, and if I have further concerns then I can look up the website on www.easywhois.com.
This activity was an eye opener, and if an adult with experience in doing online reserach can be fooled by the information on this website, then surely a child can as well. When teaching children to do research, we must also share with them how to "decode" URL addresses and how to use sites such as easywhois that can help to validate websites that may be used for research.
Delicious
This was another website that I thought was kind of interesting-saving your favorite sites to a web based bookmark. I don't spend a lot of time online visiting websites; therefore I don't have a lot of stuff bookmarked on my computer. Nonetheless, I did think the idea itself is a cool one because computers get viruses and crash all the time, and using Delicious one could always get back to their favorite sites at least.
One interesting thing did happen as I was becoming a follower of everyone's blog, I saw something interesting on Anne's blog. She had a concept map made of all these words in various fonts and sizes using something called Wordle. I thought it was so cool that I did bookmark Wordle on my Delicious account and I am going to play around with it right now.
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Melanie: I enjoyed your MAPping blog. I needed a good chuckle, and your octopus in the tree did the trick. Also, you did an outstanding job on your avatar. I have not done one - something I read made me think they might charge a fee later down the road, and I didn't understand why they needed my birthdate. I guess I'm a little suspicious.Good job on yours.
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