DIG 315 Week 3 In Review

This week was another good week. I thoroughly enjoyed the newsletter and the HTML lab, while a little tedious at times was very good. It makes it even easier to change around my MySpace page.
The website evaluation articles gave me a lot to think about. There is so much information floating around out there on any given subject and most of it is either outright untrue or purely opinionated depending on the author's point of view. That is OK if you are looking for other people's views or it is just for purely entertainment. If you are looking for facts or educational material, it is very important that you evaluate the websites with a critical.
Determining the purpose of the author's intent and if the information is purely opinion or if there are facts behind it is probably the most important for me. I chose 2 sites on the Mayan Calendar and the Doomsday Prophecies behind the end of it in 2012. They were: http://www.armageddononline.org/2012.php and http://www.michielb.nl/maya/

The first one I found to be interesting and filled with lots of information regarding 2012, not just Mayan, but other prophecies as well. It all has to be taken with a grain of salt, which the author does most of the time. There was a a lot of factual information and a lot of what I would consider to be straight entertainment, but I felt like it was easy to differentiate between the two.

The second one contained factual information about the Mayan Civilization and I found it to be more educational based. I believe it was a project for a college student and was structured in more of an educational format. I have a pretty extensive knowledge of the Mayan Civilization and found the material to be true and could also easily be checked on educational databases.

Overall, another great week. I already was critical of websites, so this did not change the way I view them, but it may enhance the way I view them going forward.

Paul Shingleton