Blog Reflection #5 Is my beloved tree octopus real?

We’ve all seen the commercial or at least heard a student say, “It has to be true! I found it on the internet.” Being a little older and a little wiser I know this little adage to obviously be erroneous. However, I did not know there were tools on the World Wide Web that could help me qualify the information I may be researching. Furthermore, after taking the “Information Literacy Quiz,” I saw just how informational illiterate I was. I will definitely be bookmarking the site http://novemberlearning.com/ to use in the future and share with my son and students. It is a wonderful site that shares different tools to make today’s learner “information literate” i.e. decide which information is true and reliable and the information that is not. To learn how to use these different tools, my educational technology assignment sent me on a scavenger hunt for the truth. I picked a topic/website of my choosing; I chose the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus because I love animals! From this point forward I was shown tools from Dr. November’s website that would allow me to research the validity of this website and its claims. After all, it’s not like the old days. Not just everyone would up and publish a book or encyclopedia on a given topic in the past, yet in today’s world, anyone can post information on the internet (look at me now). I was first taught how to analyze the URL, uniform resource locater. (Look at me learning!) I noticed that is had .net in its URL which shows it is a network, not a site from an educational institution or even the government. Next, I thought maybe the website was a person’s name, but was unsure. I then used the link command to see what other websites might be linked to the tree octopus website. It was interesting to see that sites regarding “Faux Sites” and even sites on how to see if another site is erroneous were listed. I then went on to use different search engines to search for just the topic “tree octopus.” I actually tried 6 of the 7 that were listed including: AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Go and Hotbot. I was immediately shocked to see how many of these “other” sites were actually owned by Yahoo or Google or even pulled the search results from those to sites to their own. Some of the sites had ads and others did not. This was explained on Dr. November’s site as well. Yahoo and Google are the biggies and so most sites by ads to appear on them. I went to the search engine watch site to see how information is sorted on the different search engines. I got a little confused but think the basic idea is that most sites are “crawler” sites, meaning that list the sites most visited. Yahoo used to be a directory site, which I’m still not very sure of what that is, but it is now a crawler as well. I did learn that Hotbot is somewhat of a metacrawler in that it brings the searches from the three major engines into its search site. The only complications I ran into were when I was trying to find the author of my site and its purpose by using the easywhois site. I was able to see an example by using a martinlutherking.org site, but my lovely Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site would not show here. I did however find success using the archive.org site to see that the site was created March 3, 1998 by Zapatopi Productions. Obviously I have not become a master of Information Literacy, but I definitely have tools I can refer to, practice and become well-equipped to use and share with others. I found this particular exercise very informative and useful! I was kind of sad to find out the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus was not real….guess my donation was for nothing! 