Researching How to Research

              The past two days in history we have been doing activities to help teach us how to use online resources responsibly, and to make sure that they are accurate, authentic, and reliable. These researching skills will help us find correct and precise information online when we need to research certain topics for an assignment. In this blog, I will share with you what I have learned from these activities.

                The first activity we did was an online activity through Google. It is called Google A Day (http://www.agoogleaday.com/#game=started). In this activity, Google gives you a random question each day that you have to answer using the search bar that Google A Day provides for you. The questions are often very confusing because they are about something that you have never heard of before and they seem to make no sense. Also, there are sometimes many layers to the question, so you have to research other topics before you can look for the answer to the question. At first, Google A Day is frustrating because the question seems to be random and makes no sense. But, as you start researching the question, you start to learn more about the topic and feel more confident about the question. Then, it is fun to try to sift through the many different websites that come up to try to find the specific answer. It was especially fun in class because we had a competition of who could find the answers the fastest. From this activity, I learned that you can’t always get all your information from the first site that comes up in your Google search; you have to go to multiple sites until you find and have double-checked your answer. Also, some questions have multiple layers, and you need to become familiar with more than one topic to answer the question.

               
              To make sure an online resource is trustworthy and is giving you correct information, it has to have 3 qualities; it has to be accurate, authentic, and reliable. We defined each of these qualities in class so that we could look for them in the websites that we searched. Accuracy is giving correct and precise information. Authenticity is being original and accomplishing what the website says it will. Reliability is being able to be trusted and depended on for good information. If a website has all of these qualities, it should be a good online resource. We looked at one website in particular on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/). At first glance, this website looks very professional and sincere about wanting to save the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. It provides lots of information on the octopus, and it even shows pictures and sightings of it as shown below.

Zapato, Lyle. Rare photo of the elusive tree octopus. Zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ (9/7/2014).

I believed the website at first, and I was interested in this tree octopus. However, when you start really looking into this website, it becomes clear that there is actually no such thing as a Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. The pictures look very fake, and it looks like they photo-shopped octopuses onto trees. Also, the author, Lyle Zapato, is very suspicious. His name is linked to a very small biography of him that includes many crimes that he has committed, and the only picture of him is a drawing. Also, if you research the website or look up other information on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, it comes up with many sites saying that the tree octopus is not real and that the website is a hoax. This website really taught me that you have to be very careful about what information you trust online because I completely believed that there was a Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus at first from looking at this website. You have to make sure that you know where your information is coming from and that it is correct and trustworthy. Although this website was authentic (it was original), it was not accurate or reliable, and it was definitely not a good online resource.