Post #3- Information Literacy

MAPping

I really enjoyed the MAPping activity that we completed this week. It was an eye-opener to me. I know all the rules about checking the reliability of websites and so on, but I do not always do it. If I don’t, I am willing to bet that my students probably don’t either. As a future librarian, I think that this would be a great activity to let the students work through just to see how “real” things might look on the internet and then turn out to be completely false. I chose to do some checking up on the giant tree octopus. That seemed pretty interesting to me. Upon first glance and even after clicking on some links and reading a little further, it really seemed that this might be a real site with valid information. I have never heard of a tree octopus, but who knows, I guess there COULD be one. I thought that the most helpful hint was using the altavista search engine to check the links to this website. When I went through the linked sites, I found phrases like, “urban legend”, “fake website”, and “internet hoax”. This was enough to prove to me that I was dealing with a bad website. I think that students would be surprised at how easy it really is to check a website. This only took me a few minutes to find out. After doing this activity, I think that I will be much more apt to do a little checking up on the claims that I read on the internet. For the future of students there are a great number of implications if we fail to teach them this lesson. With more and more use of the internet, there are going to be more sites like the tree octopus one and is put there for a joke or something like that. Students have to be more cautious about what they read and go a little further with their research.

Delicious

I have used Delicious in past semesters, but I have actually not been using it to its full ability. I like the idea that it is web based, so I can have my bookmarks anywhere that I go. When I went back to my Delicious account today, I found that my tags were in a mess. Once I got my tags better organized, I could begin to see the value of tagging websites for different uses or topics. I think that Delicious will be very valuable to me as a future librarian because bookmarking for student research is something that is done often. If I am at home or at school, I can make bookmarks just the same. I also like the ability to network with other Delicious users to that we can find even more great sites and we don’t have to waste our time reading about a giant tree octopus!!