One of my good friends really surprised me this morning when she asked me "How do I find outside sources for my paper?" I of course assumed that this is the kind of thing that everyone learned to do in high school. She needed to find "Scholorly articles." for her paper. She said she had been using google, but wasn't sure what articles were considered scholoarly. Luckily for her, i had just gone over this in class. I told her a few quick things like addresses ending in .edu or .gov were usually pretty reliable. I also explained to her how a website like "wikipedia" would not be a good rescource because anyone can go in and edit the information.
Being confused by what's "good information" and what's "bad information" makes sense. It is hard to tell who is a professional and who is just making stuff up. At Marist, it's easy to find good information because so many of the texts that are found in the library can be found directly online. Then you know what you are finding is legitimate information.
Tonight I also learned about a website called www.whois.com which gives information about the publisher of the website. The most common example to show how deceiving websites can be is www.martinlutherking.org. What seems like an informative website, is actually headed by a white supremacy group. If you searched "Martin Luther King" through Google this website would come up. Most people wouldn't notice such a mistake. So I guess the point of my blog this week is that everyone should be taught how to research online and find the best sources for their project.
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