Reflection #5 MAPing Information and Social Bookmarking

Reflection #5 


MAPing Information

Last Summer I was taking a graduate course in Topology, which is a math course which dealt with the properties of topological spaces.  Most, if not all, of the course work was proofing theorems about these spaces on the white board in class.  Students would come to class prepared to present their proofs.  After presenting their proof our Professor and the class accept the proof or find fault with it.  One of the tools/methods someone can use in deriving a proof is by using/siting the results of an already proven theorem in their argument.  It happened one day that a student presented a rather long proof and referenced the results of a theorem we had not yet covered in class but that he had found on-line.  It turned out the theorem he discovered on-line was wrong and was probably a theorem a grad student had posted on-line.  This incident reinforced something I learned early, anybody can post something on-line.  Yet another example of this, my wife and I just had our 2nd daughter on January 17th.  As soon as my wife found out she was pregnant she started looking on-line for advice on everything; from what she should eat to how often the baby is supposed to move.  For every piece of advice/direction she found on-line she could find a conflicting example later on.  As you can imagine she spent a lot of time on-line.  If you want to see a gynecologist shake their head start a question with' "I found this on-line...."  We could have used some INFORMATION LITERACY.  In the future before relying on the information I find on-line I will follow the steps presented in the MAPing activity.

I can only agree with Dr. November that given the way people are now getting their information and then basing their decisions on this information it is important that Information Literacy be considered basic skill.  

I chose to dissect the website http://www.ntxe-news.com/, which is a on-line newspaper covering the local counties.  I realize that like any traditional newspaper the main purpose of North Texas E-news is to proved the community it serves with news it is also supposed to make money through advertising, thus it would be wise to dissect it.  However, there is very little information that I got from easywhois or archive.org other that the author's name and how long the website has been around.  What I can say about the website is that given that so many eyes are looking at it and taking in the information it would be difficult for it to continue if the information was consistently wrong.  The website is kept honest by it's readers. 


Social Bookmarking


By far the biggest advantage to using a social bookmarking site like Delicious is that you can take advantage of other's efforts.  Weeding through all the websites that come up when you Google a topic like "Educational Technology" can be tiring and discouraging.  I envision using my delicious account in the future to network with other math teachers and looking for video lectures on topics I will teach in class, hopefully  given by "mature and effective teachers".  Thus, helping my become an effective teacher in a shorter amount of time.