Evaluating websites exercise

I just gave my "Clean Off Your Google Goggles" Workshop for the 3rd time. This time was very successful. I presented the workshop, and then I had the students complete the exercise that is shown above. I think it really helped the students have an understanding of the quality of resources they will receive with using different search engines.

In this workshop, I also introduced how to search for only government websites in Google. This feature is at www.google.com/unclesam. This website will definitely be useful to our Criminal Justice students.


A Search for the "death penalty" is shown below. The students were able to see the quality of results were better than searching for the death penalty under the normal google.com platform.

** Sorry for cross posting. I also put this blog post on my personal/professional blog.

The Future of Reading - Part II

"Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers" is the front-page headline of the Monday, Oct. 6, 2008, issue of The New York Times. It is the second installment in the paper's "Future of Reading" series. The series is "looking at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06games.html

WebJunction 2.0

I know that Sara told us all about WebJunction a while ago. Just thought I'd bring it to your attention that they have revamped their website to 2.0

If you aren't familiar with the site, they offer online courses, etc. specific to libraries-

http://webjunction.org/home

Article - As Seen By The Color Blind

I originally saw this article in American Libraries (ALDirect):

As Seen By The Color Blind
By evad in Tools, Guides, Popular, ArticlesPrint this page

In the U.S. 7% of the male population – or about 10.5 million men – and 0.4% of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently. Color blindness affects a significant amount of the population, and it is even more prevalent in more isolated populations with a smaller gene pools. It is mostly a genetic condition, though it can be caused by eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals.

For those of us who see colors just fine, it is hard to imagine what those with color blindness are seeing. Luckily humans are smart and have created technology like the Color Blind Web Page Filter.


rest of the article, examples at http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/07/24/as-seen-by-the-color-blind/

Clean Off your Google Goggles

I created a new workshop this past quarter called Clean off your Google Goggles.

I thought I'd share some of the concepts and a few of the slides.


I had the students help me make a list of what constitutes a quality website and a poor quality website. The students actually put together a nice list, and it was a great, interactive way to start the workshop.



Next, I showed the students some examples of bad websites and good websites. It's easy to find links for these sites b/c of lists like this provided on the web.



Then, I explained all the other fixings that Google has to offer like Google Scholar, Images, News, Maps, Alerts, etc. The students didn't seem aware of anything beyond the usual, basic google.com search. I think they were pretty intrigued by setting up an Alert to track websites and articles throughout the few weeks that they'd be doing research each quarter.

Also, I think they liked being able to search solely for newspaper articles similar to searching for newspaper articles in the databases.









Next, we went through the alternatives to Google. I took them through google search in each of the different jazzy google options like Scholar, etc, and then I used the same keywords that we selected in the Ebsco databases. Then, I took them to Encyclopedia Britannica.