I started off by taking the Information Literacy Quiz. I have always considered myself very technologically literate, but I have never felt more illiterate on the subject. I correctly answered 6 questions, but I had anticipated being able to answer more, I learned a great deal about what I did not know by taking the quiz.
The MAPping activity was eyeopening!!! I decided to do my activity on the website All About Explorers. The domain name was All About Explorers and the extension .com shows that this is a company, and these sites can be purchased by anyone. This is not a personal page, due to the lack of add ons after the .com. At this point in my research, this site seems to be very reliable, and nothing is sticking out to me in a negative way. From going to Alta Vista to search the link I found several teacher's pages who linked to this page, which only increased my view on it's reliability. When searching the term "explorers" in Google this site was the 6th result. On Yahoo, it was 66th, Infoseek it was 66th, and on Excite I stopped at 1o0 when I still had not seen it. After seeing this I started to get a bit wary about why the results were so far down the page. Search engine watch listed Google as the "go-to" place to find information, so now I was wondering what's going on. Google, allows ad placement for money to help run their site, or for personal gain!? This site was authored by HostMoster.com on May 22nd, 2003 and was last modified on June 7th, 2010, not too long ago. Finally in searching for the "why" this page was authored I found some very interesting information on the "about" page of the website... there was a disclaimer from the Teacher who authored the page stating that this page was "developed by a group of teachers to teach students about the internet" and "all biographies are fictional". That's where my WOW came in. I would have totally trusted this site and not looked twice at the ABOUT page. I learned my lesson and will NEVER make that mistake again.
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