In Saturday’s week-in-review I mentioned that NBC’s webpage about Olympic archery contains quite a few errors. I’ve been thinking about that a lot as I’ve watched the Olympic archery matches this week. Last night, it occurred to me that NBC probably has other niche sports pages containing errors. My guess is that we all have students who are into one or more of those niche sports. Likewise, we all have students who may have hobbies they’re passionate about, but we don’t know much about ourselves. For example, six years ago I had a student who was quite passionate about making raising bees, I couldn’t have told you the first thing about raising bees.

Thinking about niche sports and hobbies prompted me to think about how I might leverage students’ interests into a lesson about web research. One way to do this is to ask students to find a webpage, perhaps on Wikipedia or elsewhere, about their favorite niche hobbies or sports. Once they’ve found a page or two ask them to try to develop a list of errors they find on the page. Then ask them to try to locate three references that confirm the errors they found on the original page.