As announced a couple of weeks ago I decided in the module I currently teach to let students find and present their own media on current topics, in this case the Credit Crunch and Climate Change in an attempt to (i) engage them more with the content and (ii) to encourage and foster their media literacy and skills.
Six groups were allocated slightly different tools such as Blogsearch, GoogleNews, BBC Web-site, YouTube, del.icio.us and Slideshare to find interesting material to share in the class.
On the day only three groups were prepared to deliver their findings; the students exploring slideshare, del.icio.us and Blogsearch claimed not to have found anything.
The remaining three groups presented the following sites:
(i)  the personal suffering in the Credit Crunch:

(ii) Doubts on  Global Warming 
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/10/19/news-media-fall-for-climate-change-hoax/
(iii) the third goup presented a BBC Web-site which I had already put on the VLE, claiming there was nothing better out there.
On inspection I found these sites very shallow (first one) and in the latter case highly provocative and inundated with offensive advertisement. When challenged about the lack of depth the students stated that they liked the funny if not silly aspects in both Web-sites and they where not unduly concerned about the lack of content.

I personally did not learn anything from visiting those sites and felt rather disappointed about the outcome of this exercise as it demonstrated the popularity of the shallowness of tthe Web amongst students. This is particulary worrysome as there are many original and novel sites out there explaining the Credit Crunch in simple language and to proof the point I pointed them to a YouTube video on the ‘Credit Crunch made easy’ (part 1)

The fact that they could not come up with something like this themselves suggests a lack of determination of making best use of the WWW for learning. Maybe students are still looking more for entertainment than education when surfing.
Sadly a missed opportunity – is more training in media literacy the solution?