Crap+Detection

Crap Detection May 19, 2010 Howard Rheingold -need to look critically at the website i.e. who is the author? -there are three main things that we need to do when going onto a site: check to see who the author is, does he/she have references, are the references credible -can use “Who Is” to find out if the authors are credible -see if they have sources and are the sources credible -ask students to look at an article and break it down through questioning, carousel, constructivist learning in general -what is the agenda of the author/what are they trying to convince me of   -has an article online about // Crap Detection // ** // What are the implications for students using the internet for research:  // ** · Essentially they need to be critical thinkers and not assume that everything they read is factual · They need to use detective skills to decide whether or not to use a site · They can look for a few basics such as is this a .org or .com or .net site · I can let them know which sites are more credible than others · They need to look for authors and sources · They can even look up information on the author to make sure he/she is credible · In order to help students with their research, I also need to stay current with regards to red flags for web pages and articles ** Setting up a “Info Dashboards, Radars and Filters”  ** -instead of setting up a ** Netvibes ** page I set up and ** iGoogle ** page - the iGoogle site was very user friendly; I liked the fact that I didn’t have to start with square one, but I could tweak the page that they gave me   -so far I have one RSS feed and a link to my Blog, but I hope to add more RSS feeds about podcasting -I’m nervous about doing my podcast, but fairly sure that I can do a half decent job of it   -I like how Howard Rheingold has a little ditty and the start of his vlogs, so I’m going to try and do that for mine too. The relevance of a ** // Info Dashboard, RSS Aggregator, Intelligence Dashboard // ** -you can get information quickly and easily without doing a lot of extra searching -the information you are most interested in is constantly being filtered and sent to the dashboard -it helps navigate the web in a more sophisticated manner -overall, it’s customized for my interests and it is extremely easy and quick to find what I’m looking for Thoughts on Social Networking based on Howard Rheingold’s "A mini-course on network and social network literacy" -a little too detailed for me with regards to the history of the net -it was interesting but not relevant for me right now