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Hey Don. Your dog didn't get
to your homework, but the &%$#@! computer got to mine. I just wrote about a two page reply to you and Lisa, hit Preview and then used the Back button and lost it all! You can bet your bippy that I'm writing this in Notepad first.
First let me give you and Lisa the Good New - Bad News routine. The good news is that your teachers and students are as good as many, and better
than most. The bad news is that your teachers and students are as good as many, and better than most.
Though you are correct about teaching students to doubt the .coms as a starting
point, but I have to chuckle about the .orgs in
light of the article you mentioned earlier in the week. On the surface it is a story about pornography sites taking over defunct education sites, but below the surface it is about Information Literacy.
NetTech was a well funded grant run out of the U of MD to build a national web site for technology coordinators, but it is no more...
The 21st Century teacher was an idea of the
Clinton administration to start a nation wide network of teachers mentoring teachers. It was Big Bucks, but it is no more...
They were dot orgs riding the crest of the dot com wave.
When their funding ran out, the sites folded. The domain
name registrations expired and were picked up by a company that "squats" on the names in the hope of selling them to someone else at a higher price.
They then the immediately put their new sites to work by putting up a home page that does two things.
1) Provides a link to a page where you
can put in a bid for the domain name. $550 is the minimum bid for the registration that cost them $70 (or less).
2) Provides an appropriate image and a link that will take you to EURO SLUTS.
Yup, 21CT and NetTech are both being held ransom by Pornography Portals.
IMPORTANT: A word of
warning. If you plan on following the links to see what I am talking about, you will be visiting a site with an image that you are supposed to be protecting against, which leads to lots of pictures you are supposed to be protecting against. You should also shut off cookies in your browser, so that the don't make more money off of you by collecting Information that they can turn around and sell.
When you reach the site you will see a rather graphic, graphic, a description of Euro Sluts, an Enter Here button, and invitation to bid on the domain name if you want to buy it.
The web site formerly known as NetTech:
http://www.nettech.org
The web site formerly known as 21st Century Teacher
http://www.21ct.org
If you clicked, did your filter catch it?
If it didn't catch it, did you click Enter Here? If you did, was your mouse trapped so that when you closed a window, another opened up? Did you get hauled down to the principal's office?
Lisa, you are SOOOO right about Information Literacy being a lot more than most people think it is.
For me, the story of 21CT and NetTech brings home the POWER of Information Literacy. Except, in this case, the Information literate party is the company (or I suspect, person) who is turning educational websites into pornographic revenue streams.
Every window that opens contains Information. Every window that opens makes money for the person who sqatted on the domain name. If
a curious teen or adult clicks voluntarily, they make more money.
If you
listed everything they had to do, to know, and to find, you would see that this person is getting rich because he knows about how to communicate effectively, how to locate Information, how to use Information, and how to turn it into money.
This isn't what we think about when we think about Information Literacy curriculum, but it is nonetheless, all about information literacy.
This is the sort of thing that teachers and
students are going to have to deal with... with or without CIPA. It's about Information Literacy and it's about Online Safety and Privacy...
If you have a chance, you might want to visit http://www.oii.org/nsba2001/11-hotlist.htm
It's
a hotlist (No porn pun intended) of a few dozen Information Literacy resources I use in workshops. Be sure to check out TILT - Texas Information Literacy Tutorial. It's an interactive tutorial in which students become Information Literacy detectives.
Take care,
Art
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