Blummy and information literacy

Blummy and Information Literacy


(From the weblog-Ed blog)
If you want a nifty little tool for teaching basic information literacy in these days of the Read/Write Web, go to Blummy, create a bookmarklet with the links outlined below, and put it on every computer in your school. Why? Because not only can you replicate much of Alan's multi-post bookmarklet (which I'm still keeping, btw,) but you can also add links that will (using my homepage as an example):
  automatically look up who owns any website you're on (pick the "Whois" bookmarklet.)
  show who is linked to a particlular site (pick the "who's linking" bookmarklet with the Google logo.)
  and shows (literally) the page that every link on the site, well, links to, creating a page of active mini-browser windows. (Pick the "linked sites" bookmarklet) This takes a while, but it's worth the wait, and you can even set the size of the screenshot that comes up. Amazing.
As Alan November likes to point out, those are three basic pieces of information that every teacher and student needs to begin to evaluate the authority and accuracy of a particular site. Knowing who owns the site tells you something. If every outgoing link is a link back to the originating site, that tells you something. If every incoming link is a link from some spam blog, that tells you something too.
There's more to talk about here, and I'm sure this isn't any huge programming marvel, but the big news is that I haven't seen an easier way yet to get this crucial information. Very cool.