It's a Jungle Out There!

Doug Johnson, on his Blue Skunk Blog, notes in a recent post how different today’s academic research endeavors are when compared to even fifteen years ago. He notes how, if you finished your formal education prior to 1995, those five to ten sources you were required to find in your university or public library were difficult to locate. He likens this to operating in an Information Desert, where resources in general are scarce, quality resources even more so, and you likely need a desert guide to lead you to any existing oases of information.

In contrast, we today operate in an Information Jungle, where the Internet presents a sea of countless sources, and our main task now is something more akin to locating the most quality oasis and determining which oases are not worth our time. As teachers and TLs we know the difficulties of teaching students the important skills and concepts of Information Literacy (IL) or Digital Literacy (DL), and we know quite clearly what it feels like to be that Information Jungle Guide: with a vibrant jungle of information teeming with an ever-multiplying web of organic thought, we must teach our students which informational branches are OK to leverage for support, and which informational insects are pure poison.

Johnson then goes on to broach the topic of “spoof websites”—that is, websites that are created with the intentional purpose of offering up an example of how easily we can be duped into believing absurd facts when they are presented in a believable style and/or context. Johnson himself was involved in the creation of a notable spoof website, the Mankato, MN Homepage, where he appears as Sheik Yabouti, visiting professor at Mandota University, wearing the garb that he had collected during his stay in Saudi Arabia. Encountering and analyzing one of these sites offers up a rich opportunity for discussion around what is good and bad about the onslaught of online information, how to determine quality and reliability in the online Information Jungle, and also raises questions that ask us to consider what kind of skills we think will be important ten or twenty years hence when information and media are even more evolved. Such conversations invite students, teachers, and TLs to consider what skills and concepts might be important to master today with an eye toward being transferable tomorrow.

Here is a list of spoof websites that Johnson includes on his blog (worth a look):

• Feline Reactions to Bearded Men
• Mankato, MN Homepage
• Dihydrogen Monoxide
• Clones-R-Us
• Northwest Tree Octopus
• First Male Pregnancy
• National Motor Vehicle License Bureau

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