Week 5 Reflection

This week I went through a few websites that had been assigned to be viewed. One of them, California's Velcro Crop Shortage was very interesting. Maybe because it was the first one I clicked on and was unsure of the purpose of the assignment, I started reading about this shortage of Velcro crops and how this was turning into an issue. It was not until I was halfway down reading I realized this is not true and started questioning the information. What this experience reminded me about is my “week 2 reflection”, where we at times believe what we read if it’s on the web. For a few minutes, I became a victim of this. Maybe if I would have found more sites about this Velcro crop shortage I might have joined the cause. It is important to learn to distinguish fact from fiction online. Like we have found ways to protect ourselves from bogus information on the daily, we must now learn to also do it online.

For starters, we can look at the web address and look for easy to spot information. This is like if we were looking for a Wal-Mart and the address we were told is a residential street, we might not find what we were looking for if we drive to that location. The domain name and extensions (.com, .edu, .gov, .mil) are the easiest way to recognize where the information is coming from.

From the web address http://home.inreach.com/kumbach/velcro.html or the site California's Velcro Crop Shortage site or address we can spot it is from a www.home.inreach.com address, if we type that in it only takes us to a blank page. Giving us reason to suspect the information we just read might not be reliable. The next thing to do is use a few search engines to find out about this Velcro shortage. Using the search engine Altavist, we find more websites selling Velcro than when we use Google or Yahoo. Most of the sites found under “California velcro shortage” explained about the site of linked it back to Novemberlearning.com which provided valuable information about dissecting a website. When using another helpful site, such as www.easywhois.com no information was found. I tried typing in a big name site walmart.com just to see what information it was supposed to provide. I found the organization it was registered to and when it was registered created. After trying to find the background to the site and not finding much, I decided it’s just an unreliable site.

Luckily, I have come to the conclusion there is not a shortage of Velcro crops in California it does not exist and it is not a real problem in which we need to help our farmers in the West. The site was created to help people learn how to dissect a website. Its purpose is for education but not to educate the public about Velcro crops.