MAPing and Social Bookmarking

After taking this Information Literacy Quiz I was shocked at the results. I consider myself a fairly tech savvy person. Although I don't have any formal training in computers, or web languages I think I can navigate the internet fairly well and get any information I need. So as you can imagine I felt pretty humbled when I got a solid 3, maybe going on a 4. How could I know so little about basic information navigation? Well that thought scared me, because if I consider myself pretty good at this kind of thing and score so low on this quiz, how must other person with less experience then me feel? I think going forward I will search for information a little different. I definitely learned that by searching with quotation marks can really weed out a lot of the information that pops up, but is not useful to me. I also am going to be more careful is figuring out exactly who posted the information and where it came from. I really take things at face value on the internet and never really thought I needed to take a closer look, but now I think it is a necessity. My confidence in information I have used in the past has definitely been rattled a little, and I don't want to fall into that trap again.
Teaching students how to find information, let alone quality information is a task that we must address quickly and seriously. I have had reports handed to me with www.google.com listed as a reference. And yes I am 100% serious. Students need to understand the implications of what taking false information can potentially do to their research. Most of these skills are not hard to acquire, but they must be emphasized so that in becomes the norm to use them. I was easily able to read through these tips and tricks in a few hours and have already began to implement them. Not only that but I have also begun to look at information with a more critical eye.

This week I also explored the idea of social bookmarking. I started by creating an account in Delicious. I see many advantages to organizing information in Delicious. Not only do you have access to all your bookmarks and websites, but you can also organize them in a much more visual manner then in your bookmarks menu in your browser. The fact that I can search for tags, or click on a label and find more resources about the same topic is awesome. It is better then a search in Google or Yahoo because you know people have already read it and and defined it as useful. The only problem I have with the site is that I didn't find it very user friendly. I would think of something that I would want to do and I would have to look at the articles or directions that were posted to figure out what to do. I could see myself using this site with my fellow teachers has a way to keep all of our resources in one place, and all be able to see sites and ideas we are using from the web.
I use social bookmarking sites Google Reader and Pintrest almost on a daily basis and I find these sites to be a little more user friendly. However these sites are a little different than Delicious, they allow you to see a snap shot of a page and usually that is all you need. Delicious offers you the ability to just have the direct links set up and organized for easy access. Overall I was glad to explore Delicious, but am not sure that I will use it in my daily life, however I think I will use it in my professional life.