MAPping Posting

I went to the Victorian Robots website. I decided it was just for fun! The information was too outlandish to be true. (A robot helped Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.) My research indicated this was a commercial web site. The author sold t-shirts and comics, in addition to having a page about Victorian Robots. Using a Search Engine, a link to an article about the website, indicated that approximately 30% of the visitors to the website believed the information concerning the Victorian Robots. That was surprising and disturbing. Relevance was the factor I thought was used in determining the order links appeared in the Search Engine results. This had the greatest impact on my opinion of search results. I usually chose the first two or three results because I thought they were more relevant to my needs. Now I know the order is determined by the number of hits a website receives that matches a search.

Students must learn to ascertain the motivation for a website. Is the author providing factual information or is there an agenda the author is promoting? This is an important issue if we are going to have an informed public and not a misinformed public.

Delicious and Google Reader are applications I am not yet comfortable with using. I feel overwhelmed with all the information and how to use it.  They seem like a better alternative than bookmarking since they can be accessed from any computer. I usually go through the following stages when I encounter a new application:

1.   Neat but complicated

2.   Totally overwhelmed-have to walk away for a while.

3.   Look in on a few times-talk to a few people.

4.   Go back and create an account and try to use the application.

5.   With time, I finally feel comfortable with the application-example I now love jing.

Microcomputer Applications is the wiki I created. I have taught this course several times and I find the lecture method boring for the students and not the best way to deliver the course content. The wiki offers opportunity for the students to get personally involved in their own learning. Videos and diagrams can be uploaded to demonstrate student understanding. Disadvantages to wikis are some students may try to “hog” information input. Other students may try to cut and paste information rather than reading and understanding their entry. Wikis fit in with the digital natives habit and skill of making short entries, often, and being continually connected.

Other Web 2.0 technologies that I would like to learn more about are Second Life and DimDim. The university SciFi Club meets in Second Life occasionally. I enjoy the idea of an avatar environment but learning how to navigate the environment seems very complicated to me. I had used DimDim in another course and found it to be similar to ClassLive. Having this tool for a school offers teachers another way to interact with their students.