At the beginning of today’s class I will collect your worksheets for Lesson One of the Check, Please! starter course. My sample version of the assignment appears below (as well as on your worksheet and on Blackboard).
Sample Check, Please! Assignment
Check, Please! Lesson One Assignment
In the first lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University, introduces the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson one is what the author terms the “Wikipedia Trick.” Deleting everything that follows a website’s URL (including the slash), adding a space, typing “Wikipedia,” and hitting “enter” will yield the site’s Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia entry that appears at the top of the screen may indicate the source’s reliability or lack thereof.
The most memorable segment of lesson one is the short, riveting video “The Miseducation of Dylann Roof,” which begins with the narrator asking the question, “How does a child become a killer?” Produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it documents how algorithms can lead unskilled web searchers down paths of disinformation. In the worst cases, such as Roof’s, algorithms can lead searchers to the extremist propaganda of radical conspiracy theorists.
Work Cited
Caulfield, Mike. Check, Please! Starter Course, 2021, htttps://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/updated-resources-for-2021/.
Sample Student Writing
Today in class we will also examine some anonymous student samples from last Friday’s collaborative writing on habits of mind. Among the questions I will ask you to consider are these:
- Have the writers briefly defined the subject (the habit of mind)?
- Have they included concrete details that demonstrate how one or more group members have developed that habit of mind?
Post Script
Scrabble invloves a combination of luck and skill, and luck was clearly on my side yesterday morning when I was able to Scrabble, or Bingo (for an additional fifty points), by playing all seven of my tiles. Using the e in ace as a bridge, I was able to play squeezes with the q on a double letter score, the first e on a double letter score, and the final letter, s, on a double word score for a total of 124 points.
Jane Lucas 