The Big6

This past week's assignment dealt with using the Big6 method for solving information problems. I was first introduced to the Big6 when I was a freshmen in high school. I'll admit that I didn't pay much attention to the method at that time. I vaugely remembered what it was about and things started to come back around to me when I read the lesson and assignment. The Big6 solves information problems by using six stages. Whether people realize it or not, they actually use different stages of the Big6 when searching for information.

For our assignment, we were to go to Big6.com and find activities that involve the Big6 that people have posted. The first activity I chose was one that used the Big6 to complete income tax returns. It was very informative as I will use this activity when I start doing my income tax returns. Since I couldn't find an activity that centered around basketball, I had to find another activity on the website as a substitute. I chose an activity that helped young students decide what socks to wear using the Big6. The author took a simple task and used the Big6 to help make a decision. If that could be done with even the simplest task then I can only imagine what else the Big6 can do.

Google Sites

I never knew that Google had so many toys to play with. Our assignment for the past week called for us to start developing our web sites for our topics. We were to create a homepage and a biography page using Google sites. When I was back in high school, I maintained a web site on Angelfire as a fan page for our high school football team. Developing my page on Angelfire was easy, but Google is much better. There are more bells and whistles to use. In a matter of 15 minutes I was able to create a homepage and biography page with a nice background and complementary text to boot. I can't wait to show off my final product.

Web Page Evaluation

This week's assignment took our class on a journey to evaluate web pages. I must say that I have done something similiar to this before without actually knowing that I was doing an evaluation. We used a check list to thoroughly evaluate two of the websites that we found for our projects. The checklist is a very in-depth one as it has you search for very specific details. For example, it calls for the researcher to see if there is any contact information for the author of the article. Many people wouldn't think to look for something like that.

My topic is a bit different because its not really an academic topic. The majority of the sites that do turn up in my searches are commercial websites. Luckily, I have gathered articles written by some well respected coaches in the game of basketball. The authors for the two websites that I choose to use for this assignment did list their contact information.