I was not looking forward to the Information
Literacy Quiz. I really don’t feel that
I’m all that tech savvy. However, I was
pleasantly surprised by my results. I
scored a respectable 8, meaning I am “somewhat savvy”. I must admit, I don’t know that I would have
scored that well had I not read the article first. I am certain the article helped boost my
score. Still, this was a fun exercise
that did boost my ego a bit.
In order to complete the week’s activities, I
followed the link to “Victorian Robots” (www.bigredhair.com
). The URL ends in .com which indicates
that this is a company website. Using
the name “big red hair” in the URL also may help researchers to see that
perhaps this is not the most scholarly of websites. At this point I realize that I probably
cannot take everything this site presents as complete truth or fact. A company can present information however
they choose. Using the link command, I
see that the links provided are all to sites that the “Victorian Robots”
creators have created. Some links lead
to more information about each individual robot. There are links to extend the information
presented about each robot creation, but there are also more artistic websites
linked. Some of the sites are personal. There are links to the creators’ Halloween
party invitations and pictures, dog website.
These links lead me to believe that I cannot take this website too
seriously. I can see that the authors of
the website are artistic and interesting but not historically accurate.
I did conduct a search for the topic “Victorian
robots” on Google, Yahoo, Bing and HotSpot.
I wanted to use HotSpot because I have never used this search engines
before. www.bigredhair.com was the first hit on
each search engine. This is perhaps due
to the fact that there are no references to Victorian robots that truly
existed. As I used the different search
engines, I noticed more advertisements on Yahoo than any other search
engine. I found them moderately
distracting. I believe this is due to
the way the search engines earn money.
Some of these engines earn money when advertisements are placed on the
page; some earn money when advertisements are clicked.
The authors of the “Victorian Robots” websites are
Paul Guinan and his wife Anina Bennett.
Both authors are artists and writers.
The artists are incredibly creative and have not formal publisher, other
than themselves. They are solely
responsible for their many sites.
The website’s purpose was originally entertainment. However, the website may seem to represent true,
historic data about actual robots in the Victorian era. Though the authors originally created this
website as entertainment, it became something of an experiment once they
realized that people believed in the Victorian-era robots they created. As quoted on WikiPedia, Paul Guinan said
“Certainly I felt happy about having achieved my
goal," he said. "I put this thing across as trying to be real, and
people bought into it. So, that's a success! But, as an amateur historian, I
feel a responsibility to get the story right. So I felt bad about some of these
people being hoaxed. It was a mixed bag." "But," he revealed,
"I thought, if I was getting this reaction and I wasn't really trying,
then what would happen if I really tried?" (Dooley 2002) .
I conducted this process on a few websites I use regularly. The sites I normally use are all academic,
educational sites that I use for work.
Evaluating the sites really helped me see that the few sites I use
frequently are great resources, created for educational purposes by
knowledgeable educators. I don’t really
use the internet for any purpose other than work, so I didn’t find sites that
were not reliable. This process will
help me evaluate the validity of websites I intend to use in the future. I also shared this process with my husband,
and he has already begun evaluating websites he uses.
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