How does a human fulfill their hunger by looking at pictures? By looking at pictures of New Orleans cuisine of course! For this task, I pretended that I was collecting data for a presentation on New Orleans food and all that jazz (HA, get it? Jazz! Right). Anyway, I wanted to get pictures first so I went on the Flickr/creative commons search engine and started typing away. My first search was “red beans and rice” where I found a plethora of pictures that fit what I needed. Then, I searched “gumbo” and something strange happened: pictures of the food gumbo did not come up, but rather the word “gumbo” written in graffiti on random dilapidated walls. I had a hard time sifting through these, or finding an option to allow me to narrow my search result. Anyway, after enough scrolling I found an adequate picture of gumbo.
I put all of the pictures I was going to use for my hypothetical presentation on OneNote. And boy oh boy, the frustration of inept user friendliness in anything Microsoft shone through it–at least it is consistent with all other Microsoft designs. I did not understand the purpose of such an app. Am I to take my life notes on it? Take school notes? I appreciate its function to take in pictures and how easy it is to write under them (which is how I sourced all the pictures I used), but I just don’t see its necessity when planning such projects.
I really enjoyed the internet archive search bar. I think that will be incredibly useful to students who need to find information that may be outdated or thought to be off the internet. In my opinion, all of the tools in the “digital hygiene” section are great and they are able to teach students how to properly do research. If a student is able to master all of these techniques (as well as cite the original author properly) then they will undoubtedly be able to conduct research on a project/paper that they need to complete.
All in all, I liked this exercise because it forced me to surf search engines that I would have never gone on before. I love the “digital hygiene” and think that all of the links in it are essential in teaching digital literacy.
Picture: “Char-grilled Oysters” by Robert Kawasaki