Serendipity35

I did a workshop this week and part of the content was about helping faculty/students evaluate materials on the Internet. One thing that was clear is that many people make assumptions about sites based on domain names. That's an iffy proposition. Yeah, most .com sites are commercial, and .gov sites are from the U.S. government. But having a .org at the end of a domain tells you almost nothing. It may have been intended for non-profit sites (and that sounds noble) but anyone can get a .org domain that's not taken. No one is checking your tax status. Here are a few items we discussed.

An example I used in the workshop is the martinlutherking.org site. It looks like an educational website about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that you'd want students to use ( or that you'd expect on a bibliography) but it's definitely not. It's a smear site produced by Stormfront, a white supremacist group.

Stormfront's home site is also a .org. They're not hiding who they are or what they believe. It's right there. But their MLK site is trying to pass itself off on first glance as something else, and I'm sure it works for many students, especially our youngest ones.

That site comes out on top when you do a Google search on Martin Luther King. Out of more than 46 million hits, they are at the top. Many of you probably know that Google results are in some way a popularity contest. The more people who link to a site, the higher it goes in search results. That's why I haven't linked to the site or its owner here.

A situation that's less clear in teaching research: Which site would you or your students trust more for information about global warming - an .edu (college) site or a .gov site? Thankfully, the teachers in my workshop were distrustful of both, knowing that each could have an agenda.

We need to teach the "re" in research and have students use more than just Google or Wikipedia. Both of those are good places to use and banning Wikipedia from being a source of research (which apparently many teachers are doing) is putting your head in the sand, because it will still be used - it just won't appear on the sources cited.

One last (and lighter) example is the domain .tv. Assumption: they are associated with the television or video industry. Actually, .tv is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the island nation of Tuvalu. (The domain is currently operated by “The .tv Corporation”, a VeriSign company.)

Any person in the world can register a .tv domain for a fee, part of the income goes to the government and people of Tuvalu. The domain name is popular since it's the abbreviation of the word "television." Japan's .jp doesn't have that appeal, but .fm, .am, .cd and .dj have potential. Domain names used this way are sometimes called domain hacks.

Many of the websites with .tv URLs are pornographic or otherwise sexually explicit sites. Apparently this has caused some controversy on Tuvalu which has a large conservative Christian population that feels that revenue from those sources is immoral. (Trivia: I do think it's interesting that the Tuvalu government's web site is a wiki, see http://www.gov.tv)

It is worth educating yourself about domain names for your own research as well as passing that information on to your students.