What's In A Domain Name?

Before going through the MAPping Information activity, I thought I was equipped to do decent enough web searches. I knew a enough to get by if I needed reliable resources for research projects or speeches. I knew better than to look to wikipedia.com as a completely reliable source, or go to only cite an ultra-conservative website like drudgereport.com to make an arguement for conservatism being more sensible than liberalism. Because I had already spent some time with the campus library staff working on projects for previous classes, I was pretty well aware of the differences between .com and .org and .gov - although I have to admit I didn't know there were so many different extensions and combinations of them. But I guess that's about it.

In going through the exercise, I realized that I still had a bit of learning to do when it comes to fully vetting a website. I never could have imagined that so much information could be gained from deciphering the URL - or Uniform Resource Locator (http://www.novemberlearning.com/, 2012) (that isn't my attempt to sound intelligent so much as it is me referring to knowledge gained roughly 5 minutes ago - yes, I'm that far behind). Then to go deeper and start to examine things like the links within the website was an idea that had never really occured to me. Most times I've just ignored them, preferring to just stay with the text that I was reading. I found, however, to do that could lead to a good bit af confusion. The link I chose for the activity was the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (http://www.zapatopi.net/, 2011). I chose it because I figured that it would be good for a laugh, and indeed it was. But it was also eye-opening. As I read through it, I started to realize how someone, to whom it might be plausible that an octopus could live in a tree, this website could sound just credible enough to make them true believers. Even with it's use of links to wikipedia to authenticate the locations or general terms used, a somewhat gullible person could really be drawn in.

I think, as a teacher, it will be helpful to know how students approach the art of gathering information. This is something that will be a huge factor in them reaching their learning goals just as it is for me. With simple knowledge like the proper way to vet a website, students will be able to avoid the many misinformation pitfalls that await them on the web.