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A few days ago, during a library orientation of 6th graders, the subject of pink dolphins came up.  A teacher had asked her students to produce evidence that they did or did not exist.  (The teacher had turned a student’s question into an assignment for the class.)

On the big screen, we searched the phrase “pink dolphin” in Ebsco’s Student Research Center 6-12 and got what looked like some legitimate scientific journalism from sources like The Times (along with articles about the Miami Dolphins football team).  But the real fun began when one student suggested we search Google Images.  Sure enough, there were more images of pink dolphins than we would ever need.  Was this proof?  Well, that would certainly require assessing the reliability of the image sources.  One student suggested that the dolphins could have been spraypainted pink.  I agreed, a bit surprised that he hadn’t suggested a less retro form of fakery such as “Photoshopped” or computer-generated.

Today, in the course of discussing with another 6th grade class why myths, legends, fairy tales, and folk tales might be found in our nonfiction area, it occurred to me that there are certainly many times the number of images of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and their ilk in Google Images.  This certainly doesn’t prove their existence, but assessing the likely reliability of these image sources and their accompanying text could be a very stimulating lesson for our young students.  I was swamped with requests for books on La Llorona after one of today’s orientations.

The boto, or Amazon River dolphin, does indeed exist.  And the teacher who suggested researching it was amazed at the great information some of her students provided on the reasons it is pink.  One of the Google Images is apparently of an albino bottlenose dolphin that ended up in an inland Louisiana lake.  Check it out.  And check out these images from The Encyclopedia of Life.  They aren’t as pink, but I imagine they’re authoritative.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Databases, Education, Reference Sources, Web Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.