Blog Reflection Five

 

Blog Reflection 5

To say that this week’s technology project was enlightening is quite an understatement. It showed me how really ignorant I am when it comes to the internet. I definitely appreciated the crash course in critically analyzing information.

I bombed miserably on the tech savvy quiz. I scored three of them correctly but was not upset about how poorly I did. Instead, after I was able to digest all that I did not know, I was excited to put it to use. The meta-web activities were interesting. I looked at the All About Explorers site. I assumed at first glance that the site was chock full of biographies and other random facts about world explorers. I looked at the domain and it was unfamiliar. I had never heard of it but the byline said that it was everything one needed to know about explorers. I just knew I would bookmark this site for later use.

I saw that the extension was .com and noticed that this blog was powered by WordPress. That was familiar since my blog is on WordPress. I looked at the about the authors section and saw that the site authors, Gerald Aungst and Lauren Zucker, were educators. The site also was linked to sites affiliated with education. In the search engines this site came up usually third. I saw a good number of advertisements for the Ford Explorer. I thought that was interesting. I figured more people were looking for a vehicle than for Lewis and Clark.

This site was created in May of 2003. Upon further exploration, the site is actually filled purposely with bogus information about explorers in order to teach students how to discern the information they find on the internet. This information is based on the meta-web information and the about this site link. The website is for educational purposes although it was highly entertaining. The “cover” stories about the site authors were hilarious.

This exercise was outside of my comfort zone. I first looked at it a couple of days ago and quickly double clicked on the X to close it. My beau had to explain some of the information I found on the easywhois search to me. I put my blog information in to search and got even more confused with what I found. He set up the shell for it. I just post! Anyway, he used shopping terms to get me to understand terms like platform and host. This new learning experience gave me an opportunity to process and to actually understand the material and not just familiarize myself with new terminology.