Searching facts on football and Ahmed Ghailani

For two days, we have now been searching for information from the web, starting from very easy small assignments about names of capitals and presidents, and moving forward to more complicated background stories.

I have underlined to the participants that it’s important to think before going to search from the web. What exactly is it that you are searching for, some fact or background or context? Do you know from which website you will probably find the information, or should you use a search engine to find it more randomly? And also, is the internet necessarily the best way to find the information you are seeking, or should you rather just call someone or go out to the streets or go to ask your grandmother?

Participants were able to easily find some background information about the Bolivian president Evo Morales, who belongs to the indigenous majority population of the country and rose to national fame as a trade union leader of the coca farmers.

In order to check for facts, one assignment was to correct a passage about the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, with a misspelling of her surname and wrong year for when she received the Nobel Peace Prize. The simple way to check both the name and the year was a Google search with the search words wangari nobel.

Yesterday, the class also googled their way to the UEFA website to find the result and all statistics from a EURO 2012 qualification football match between Finland and San Marino, played in Helsinki late on Wednesday. The final result was 8-0 for the home team with a hat-trick by Mikael Forssell, striker of the German team Hannover, but previously also Chelsea and Birmingham.

At the end of the day, the task was to search for information about the Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, yesterday found guilty in a New York court for taking part in the arrangements of the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. Ghailani was finally sentenced for only one conspiracy charge, but cleared of 276 other murder and conspiracy charges.

Here are some good reports and commentaries on Ghailani by Marko Gideon, IPS News, Marc Nkwame, Daily News, Lulu George, Nipashe correspondent of Tanga, and Nebert Mramba, Business Times, who writes in Kiswahili. Some say Ghailani should surely remain innocent, others would send him to jail.

Marc Nkwame writes in his posting that Ghailani doesn’t know how to drive the car, “which leaves many to wonder how he was able to accomplish his missions, most of which required fast movements from one point to another, sometimes carrying heavy explosives.”