Reflection 5

Not Analyzing Internet Information: The Implications for Students
The Internet now is the number one source used by students in research. We no longer have to go to the library to check out tons of books and read through massive amounts of text to find the information we are searching for. Unlimited information is now available with just a few keystrokes. However, all of this information still has to be filtered due to the overwhelming amount of fictitious information available on the web. The filters at school stop some sites from being accessed, but students access it all at home. So even though the information comes to us in a much faster speed, it still takes some time to analyze each site to determine its validity. Students need to realize this now—before they get into college and in their careers. It is our responsibility as educators to teach these skills to our students. If not, they could be led far away from the truth without even knowing it.Information Literacy
I really thought that I had more knowledge about information literacy, especially since I teach students how to analyze websites. I was obviously wrong. My score on the Information Literacy Quiz was 6, which was only “moderately savy”. I have always warned my students to look closely at information on the web because anyone can put information out there, and I have warned them over and over again that just because it is on the web doesn’t mean that it is true. I teach students to analyze websites by analyzing the URL, looking at the author information, looking for update information, finding out who is affiliated with the site (usually in the copyright information), and by really looking at the content of the site for validity and bias. I always give an assignment at the first of the year for students to analyze at least two sites. I was not aware of http://www.easywhois.com/, http://www.archive.org/, or how to use the Link: in AltaVista to find all the web sites that were linked to a page. These are excellent tools, and I plan to incorporate these methods of analyzing sites as well as using the November Learning site next year in my lesson.MAPping Activity
For the MAPping information activity, I went to “California’s Velcro Crop under Challenge” site. This site was pretty easy to analyze. The name of the author in the URL (http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html) gave away the fact that it was a personal site. The only other link on the page was for the author’s name. When you go there, you see “Who is Ken Umbach?” as the title, and the subtitle reads, “A Totally Bogus Biography." Another link takes you to a sound clip that I think says, “Enjoy this.” This to me was the author's way of saying, "Gotcha!" When I used the easywhois site to find the publisher, there was no match found--another bad sign. The history of the site, according to the Wayback Machine shows that the site was created in April of 2001. I looked at the other years for the site’s history and found it had not changed since first created. The links proved the site to be even more unreliable. The first linked site was to “Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators” to use for critical evaluation of web sites, and the second link was for “Hoax Websites”—which listed this site among the hoaxes. When I used different search engines to look up the subject velcro crops, this was the first site listed on each (Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista). I was always under the assumption that relevance was what drove the order of the listed results for a search from a search engine. I only now realize, after reading the articles for this class, that some search engines display results by the number of hits to the site. I am so guilty of almost always using the first few sites listed instead of filtering through more. After analyzing this site, I really don’t understand why this site was created. Why would someone even take the time to create this is beyond me. It really makes me wonder, how many more thousands of sites are there out there just like this?

When I was in undergraduate school, I really mainly used books, magazines, and periodicals from the library (the old fashioned way) to research. I really didn’t start using the Internet for research until recently, and I never really analyzed my sources the way I should have. Even though I thought I was doing a good job, I realize now after completing this assignment that I really was not.