CIW Internet Business Associate Lesson2: Social Media, Wikis and Blogs

Discuss how social media affects the daily lives of your students, their friends and families. Compile of list of the top sites and have students create “netiquette” rules for those sites. Using a current topic in the news, have your students review several different sites that address the topic. Have them look for key differences in how the same topic is presented. (Some suggestions here are http://www.drudgereport.com/, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/, http://online.wsj.com/home-page, www.cnn.com, http://www.theonion.com/) Discuss how having so many different sources of information is both positive and negative. (If you can find a few blogs to represent different perspectives for your topic that is also helpful.) Have the class list the pros and cons of wikis that are open to the public, such as Wikipedia. Discuss the vetting process of information online and come up with strategies for knowing how to tell if information online is true, biased, false, or misleading. Apply the same to blogs. Compare a blog about technology with the White Papers from a company. What are the differences? When would the information in a blog be most useful? Least useful?