Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

My student, Martin, who is also busy helping me get podcasts (coming soon!) ready for our Virtual Library, wrote to share some stuff he thought I’d enjoy over the break.

On its About page, Uncyclopedia calls itself:

“an encyclopedia full of misinformation and utter lies. You might say it puts the “psych!” in “encyclopedia”. It’s sort of like Congress or Parliament, but unlike Congress or Parliament, we do have a sense of humor. Nonetheless, this is one of the only factual pages, before everything turns into a puddle of utter confusion and disarray.”

Martin’s description:

“This is a parody of Wikipedia where none of the information, where there is
any, is correct in iny way, shape or form. It’s quite funny in large places. A sample: Where the Wikipedia logo would be, there is a parody of it; a hollow potato named Sophie. Thought you would like something funny.”

I am thinking about how we might use this with learners. Perhaps publishing some creative parody writing?

Martin also shared a Flickr game, Fastr. The game generates a group of ten Flickr images. Your challenge is to guess the common tag. I wonder if we might use this to introduce the concept of tagging as a searching tool. (Warning, some images may not play well for third graders.)