Dispute Finder
I’ve been fighting the browser wars pretty hard for the past month or so.
While I have a Mac, I just have never been much of a Safari fan. Really no reason, I was just not comfortable with it. I had been a huge fan of Flock since it was only out in beta. A few quirks built up into annoyances and I decided to move on from there. In the past month or so I’ve been through Google Chrome (didn’t get along with WordPress, no other search engines than Google available) to Opera (love the Lounge and a few other features, but could be slow sometimes) and now I find myself back to Firefox, a browser I haven’t sued much for several years. I’m enjoying the ability to customize it with themes and plugins. One plugin I’ve found and have been playing with is Dispute Finder.
Relying on the crowd, Dispute Finder is a plugin that lets anyone highlight webpages, marking up claims that they simply don’t agree with by pointing to alternative points of view.
For example, an article in today’s New York Times entitled Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets talks about how groups that have in the past spoke out against the teaching of evolution in schools without looking at alternative points of view hoave now added global warming to the list of theories they want examined. With Dispute Finder installed an running in Firefox, as I scrolled through this page I found this:
Clicking on the light bulb, I found this window popped up:
In this window you can read arguments and find links to articles that people have posted about the content that is presented on the webpage. With a Dispute Finder account, you can also tag things yourself or add content to material that other people have tagged.
From a critical literacy standpoint I am fascinated by the possibilities this presents. Firefox running on school computers and Dispute Finder activated? Students can now tag material they are researching, finding material they agree with or don’t agree with, posting arguments and links either for or against. This could all be collated and examined. What did you find? What did you tag? What are your arguments and points of view?