Searching for Dinosaurs?

To start off history for the year, we needed to review a bit of media literacy. That means knowing how to search the Internet for information and how to tell if sites can be trusted for good information. We used two sites in class: A Google a Day and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

A Google a Day is a challenge for the tech-savvy. It presents you with three questions each day: ones that can’t be answered with a single Google search, but rather with multiple searches to put together puzzle pieces that lead to the final answer. I found it fun while uncovering parts of the puzzle, as a string of answers. Searching up John Waters led to Divine led to Clarabell the Clown, leading to the final answer, The Howdy Doody Show. What I didn’t find fun was having an answer that was right, and that fit the question, but was still wrong. A question like “Under modern classification, what clade do birds belong to?” is somewhat broad. It got especially frustrating when the hint was “D_____” yet Dinosauria, the clearest answer given by most sites, didn’t work. It took until after the whole challenge was over that someone figured out the answer was “diapsids”. At the very least, I learned that birds are diapsids, along with some fun facts about random celebrities.

"Tree Octopus." www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.

The second site we looked at to talk about media literacy was the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. We checked the site in three categories: accuracy, authenticity, and reliability. Accuracy is how truthful and up to date information is, because you can’t have wrong or out of date information if you’re using a source for school. The site fails this test because it makes multiple references to Sasquatch, which sets off alarm bells as to where this information is coming from. The site has very few links to sources outside the domain zapatopi.net, which gives the researcher no way to cross-verify any information on the site. Authenticity is the genuineness of a site, or if it is what it seems to be. The site also fails this test because it appears to be a movement to charitably help an endangered species, but upon further searching, you will find two things. One, no proceeds from the tree octopus merchandise on the site go to help the species. Two, a quick search on the Internet reveals the whole thing to be a hoax, which certainly removes the site from usable sources. Reliability is how dependable the information is, which normally falls to how trustworthy the person who wrote the site is– that is, if the author is an expert in the field or not. The site creator is one Lyle Zapato, who disclaims association with any educational organizations other than the Kelvinic University, a fictional school also under the zapatopi.net domain. The site clearly fails all three criteria for usage in school research, and should be avoided in favor of other, more trustworthy sites.

These two activities on media literacy were a nice start to the school year, and I am glad that we went through it a little before getting into many research assignments.