This week's Assignment:

Conduct research on Dinkytown (subject of extensive scholarly work).

Here is the site to organize materials found

Then, reflect on what you did--the processes you employed in conducting your searches, what you found (or didn't find), difficulties and challenges in collecting relevant material, the importance of the assignment itself, and how you might teach search strategies to students.

…

I began my search for materials on Dinkytown with a few general searches on Google. I searched for words like “Dinkytown” and “history,” or “Dinkytown” and “architecture.” This was mainly to get a sense of what is out there, although I did find some interesting articles from local newspapers and on local zines.

Most of the articles I found were about restaurants, shows, and other entertainment related topics. Also, I found a few sites related to Minnesota history like “James Lilek’s recollections of Dinkytown”.

Next I checked out wikipedia. I am, of course, critical of the information I find on wikipedia, although no more so than many Internet sites. I read the article on wikipedia and explored the footnotes that the authors had left behind.

I decided to concentrate on cultural aspects of Dinkytown because no one had yet posted any information under than sub-heading. The most interesting sites I found were a site on the Dinkytown tradition of protest and another on a current student’s reflections on the Friday night college student release into Dinkytown.

When I am doing research for an academic paper I admit that I rarely use the Internet. If I find a page that is from an academic source and well supported and footnoted I have been known to use it, but I am always tentative. You see, I believe the Internet is a reflection of the real world, and so I trust the information I find there as much as I would trust what I heard someone say on the street. Of course, you can hear some pretty cool things on the street if you listen.

I think this was a valuable assignment, in that it was a relatively easy and high interest research topic for us to use in exploration of the research process itself.

I do use the Internet for quick research to use in my classroom. If I need some background information on a historical figure, the quickest things I can do is look on wikipedia or biography.com. I try to use my knowledge of history and previous experiences on the Internet as a guide when deciding how much of this information is valid.

I have a lesson plan I use with my students before beginning a lesson plan where we explore the racist page martinlutherking.org and I allow them to discover for themselves how misleading and incorrect a web page can be. The lesson asks them questions, which will eventually lead them to see that although the site claims to be the “truth about Dr. King,” it is actually a thinly veiled white supremacist site. By the end, the lesson shows them that little on the site can be trusted.

From this lesson, I teach them some search strategies and be begin an inquiry project into a subject of their choice requiring good amounts of internet research. All research is done in class, supervised by me.