MAPping Information, Before and After

When I woke up this morning, I was a lot like most college students these days. I felt I already had a pretty good understanding of how to use a search engine thanks to being the product of a digital generation—and by that I mean I knew how to Google.  I admit I’ve never understood the other “big ones” out there, mainly because Google has always been enough for my needs.  With the exception of minor experience with Alexa, I wasn’t aware of the web-analysis tools out there.  Sure, I knew they existed, but I didn’t know where to find them or how to use them.  Because websites can be so misleading or outright malicious, I’m very interested in new ways to view and study them.  In general the MAPping Information has been very welcome news to me.

In the future I definitely want to keep using techniques like the AltaVista commands.  I can see lots of academic uses to help me with my focus.  For example, typing “host:edu + [topic]” looks extremely helpful to search for things like “creative writing”.  Also I find myself wishing I had known about “easywhois” a long time ago.  I’m pretty sure it could have saved me a headache or two in previous classes, so I’ll be sure to remember it in the future.  I think the tools provided are quite helpful, not only to double-check myself in the future but also to accurately determine the integrity of students’ work.  I plan to share these tools with both peers and students whenever appropriate, and hopefully spare them a few headaches too!

All in all, the MAPping Information Activity has been exceptionally helpful.  Whether I’m poring over data or critiquing a paper, some part of me genuinely enjoys critical analysis (crazy, I know), so I feel confident I’ll naturally return to these techniques in the future.  If I had to choose a negative feeling after what I’ve learned, it would be the regret I have of just now learning it.  The ability to easily look up publisher information or specify academic material in a search engine would have been extremely valuable to me from the beginning.  But I suppose wishing I could have had a good thing sooner is the good sort of problem, now isn't it.