Wow! There certainly are a lot of Web 2.0 tools from which to choose to investigate. Some of them I have heard about, others I have not. I chose to take a look at Craigslist because I have heard about it, and it has also been in the news a time or two. I also have a car that I want to sell eventually, but I'm just too busy now with schoolwork to deal with a ringing telephone or answering email inquiries about it. But eventually.....
I started my discovery exercise in a naive fashion: by googling the word "craigslist." Hummm. Only 218 million possibilities popped up. Maybe I should refine my search a little. So I typed in the exact location of the town in which I live and-bingo-that refined the search just a wee bit shall we say.
The site has listings for several broad categories: community, housing, jobs, personals, discussion forums, and services. Underneath these broad categories are more specific categories for just about anything one could think about. It also contains instructions from the site administrators for setting up an account, getting help, and a tremendous amount of information about scams and frauds. In addition, there are personal safety tips, general information about the company, and directories.
First of all, let me say that I was really glad about the scam alerts. I found myself headed for trouble a number of times while just trying to browse the site and check out the categories. You can quickly get mired in smut unintentionally (for example, "rate my last hook-up") or click on something that might destroy your computer if you are not careful.
The most useful features on this site are under the housing and for sale categories. Most of them really are localized and could be very helpful for people seeking a place to live, just selling odds and ends, or just checking out what odds and ends are for sale.
The rest of the site, in my opinion, is not even worth exploring. I personally even found some of the category listing under "personals" offensive, and would not even want to explore them. I tried checking out some of the "community" and "discussion forums" categories and found that they quickly seem to degenerate into smut and offensive comments, regardless of the the category. It seems like there are a lot of mentally sick and angry people out there.
I could not see any useful purpose for this website anywhere in a K-12 school. It would be impossible to control the lewd content to which students would be exposed and would therefore be inappropriate for a school setting.
Here's the link to the site I checked out: http://clarksville.craigslist.org/.
No comments:
Post a Comment