Tell Me Why? is the title of a series of books I had growing up in the early 70s. There were three or four books in the series, and I have one of them on my bookshelf today. As a child, I greatly enjoyed the books, and to this day remember looking out the window of the car as we drove through the night knowing why the moon was following us, all thanks to the “Tell Me Why?” books.
The blog “Tell Me Why?” is not from the same publishing company as the educational resource books of my childhood but the mission behind the blog is quite the same. Authored by an “R. Edmondson,” Tell Me Why? happily answers the little questions we all have in life, such as “Why do people burp?” and “How deep is the ocean?” The site is an easy to read and navigate blogger template, and there is little or no difficulty in getting around. R. Edmondson does not state where he’s from or how he knows all of these things, which immediately triggers suspicion on my part as a parent and a former educator.
Going back through the archives, I noticed that the October 2006 entries were put into place to establish the top level navigation topics such as Links and FAQs pages, as well as a page for webmasters to set up affiliate sites. The site is set up as an educational site, but really is a site for generating cash through affiliates and yahoo ads. Every entry has a yahoo ads section. Children who are unfamiliar with the internet will possibly be confused by why the yahoo ads are there in the first place on EVERY single entry.
Additionally, when one is looking at a site like Tell Me Why? and desires to research the topic further, one enjoys links to other resources. R. Edmondson provides links to Universal Facts, a website he also manages. There aren’t any links out to NASA or NOAA, or websites from which students should be obtaining primary source material. If I were currently an educator, I wouldn’t mind a student using Tell Me Why? to get ideas started for a paper, but doubt I would accept it as a primary source for my students’ research. The site encourages people to link to it. It would also be helpful if it linked to other sites outside of the R. Edmondson universe.
R. Edmondson states he has written all of the articles inside “Tell Me Why?”, and I have to believe he is the absolute font of all knowledge in the universe because I don’t see any sourcing for the information he presents. I find any website that does not source its content to be suspect in some way, shape or form. Additionally, there wasn’t no source information for the graphics used. As someone with a degree in technology education, I find that suspect and a not very careful way to present a site that expects other people not to infringe upon his own copyright.
Because it is fun to learn trivial things even into your 40s and because no one is giving me a scholarship to a major university based upon this “research paper,” I have to say that the content of the site was interesting enough to entertain me on a cold and rainy New England day. I give “Tell Me Why?” a 3 rating, and would encourage R. Edmondson to source his work a little better and reveal more of who he is and upon what authority he writes. That way, I can feel comfortable seeing my kids use his site to learn something.
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