Thing #6 Digital Citizenship

The first site I looked at is the Dihydrogen Monoxide as a threat site.  It does help going in that I knew that DHMO is just another way of saying "water" (H2O) - once in a while I get to put my Chemical Engineering degree to work...

The site is well done. However, the credibility quickly drops when Wikipidea lists it as a hoax, along with the standard hoax sites. Clicking on the credible list of links and then cross-checking DHMO comes up empty.  The site provides links, but there is no association between them.

Accuracy:  statements are made (DHMO causes car accidents) without substantiation. There's nothing behind the statements.

The site appears to be updated daily - nice touch.

I can see how people could be fooled by the site, but a quick check in the real world sets things straight pretty fast.

The second site I visited was the New Hartford, MN site. There are credibility issues on the main page - "Updated January 1 and June 3 of this year", the main city URL takes you right back to the same page, there is no "East Green Earth River" and a quick MapQuest shows that New Hartford, MN is a country intersection, with farms on all sides of the road - no river, no bridges, no people.  None of the schools exist.  Pretty easy to write this one off on credibility, accuracy, date.

2.  At Catholic Central, we address moral and ethical issues head-on.  I have discussed cyber bullying, displaying personal information on the web, and acceptable use several times with our students.  When we talk about getting on the web, youtube, facebook, etc., we discuss these issues along with what the students should be doing on those sites.  Two activites: class discussion and the signing of acceptable use contracts by the students.  This is becoming a broader issue as we are going wireless campus-wide, so the issues are getting greater administrative attention as well.