Thomas began today's class with a die activity that allowed the students and instructors to
get to know one another before beginning class. Once everyone became better acquainted with
one another they started the straw activity. The purpose of this activity was to have the
students begin to question whether or not they could believe someone or something simply
because they are told that the source is credible. The students were separated into 3
groups. Each group was given one box of straws and told to make observations of what they
believed their box contained. Initially the students hypothesized what the box would contain
according to the description written on the box. After the groups shared their observations
they were allowed to open the boxes and find out if they were correct. They discovered that
none of the boxes actually contained exactly 40 boxes as written on the box. Next they read
the box more carefully and measuring the straws discovering several other errors in the
description. This activity helped the students begin thinking more in-depth about things and
question why they should believe what they see and why they can't always trust so called
reliable sources.
For the last half of the class the students worked on the computers. Thomas talked to them
about trusting websites and the signs of a website being more credible or less credible and
why. He used Myspace as a relative example to show how easy it is for people to share false
information on online. Another example used was the online, open-source encyclopedia
Wikopedia, which allows anyone to insert information into its database.
Next the students learned about various search engines. They compared the results of the
same searches they received from Google and Yahoo. Thomas then explained why the results
were different on the different sites. Lastly the students were given an online scavenger
hunt. They were asked to find the answers to several questions using the search engines they
learned about today. This was meant to help the students familiarize their selves with the
Internet.