Hello everybody!
...I wasn't in class last week....But I took a peek in the blogs of my school mates! They discussed the importance of criteria that we use while searching information on the web. In general the most important things that we should examine are: the author, the website and the contents.
As a first thing we should discover who is the author, whether he is known in the community or not, if he can be considered as an authoritative person, other information.
The author is the fundamental part of the information which is given: if he is an engineer or a lawyer, for example, he may use specific terms and we would be prepared with a good dictionary!
Speaking about the website we should always look at the domain and the date of publication. We often think that all the things published on the Internet are fresh and new, but they're not! We must be careful! The web could also contain old websites, with old information (obviously I am referring to political or economic information). Another important thing that has to be considered is the fact that in the Internet there is a kind of copyright. There are no specific rules about it but it is to say that some images and documents cannot be copied but just seen or analysed.
As far as the content is concerned we should ask ourselves: is the content reliable? Are there any external references or useful links?
What is the layout like? It is important to see if in the website there are pictures or emoticons or videos because we may discover more things about the author (for example his/her age).
From my personal point of view when I search for information of the Internet I focus first on the information...and after a long while...I also try to understand who is the author, when he wrote that piece of information and so on... I'm not a good web explorer!!!
I never tried to ask myself "mmmh, let's see why the author wrote this text, when and where did he published it, is there any copyright..." Basically I think that the Internet is the fastest way in order to find information and it is also the easiest! If I am searching for information on the web I search the information and anything else....!
What I always forget is the fact that there is no difference between an on-line research and a research made inside a library, the only thing that changes is the 'channel' we use. In an on-line research I find the text, copy it somewhere and then copy the URL of the web site.
In a research made in a library I am forced to pay attention to every single information. If I imagine to be in a library and make a research the first thing I do is to search few books which satisfy my criteria. Once I have found a nice number of books I start to read their index and catalogue the information that could be useful for my work. For every book I write in a sheet of paper: the title, the author, the date of publication, the pages that interest me and even other additional information. I would make this work for every book I use! Paradoxally it seems to me an obvious procedure for a textual research but a useless procedure for an on-line research!
I always should keep in mind that an on-line research is perfectly like a textual research and all the information within the text are important just like the text itself!
Our teacher gave us interesting comments made by university students about the search for information on web-sites:
- Tips from the University of Essex- Tips from Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL)
- Tips from San Diego State University
I absolutely agree with these comments. The web contains thousands of information and we sould be very careful in finding what really interests us. The process of searching information on the web is considered an art because everybody recognizes the difficulty of finding information among the huge quantity of texts in the web.
A nice help is given by the San Diego State University whose web site contains a list of things to do when we search in the web:
- first of all we should look at the author, the title, the publisher and the date of publication
- then we focus on the content
Once we have read the text we should focus on the other information:
- who is the author (individual/organization) and the publisher?
- what can be said about the content, the context, the style and the accuracy?
- when was the information published?
- where else can the information provided by the source be found?
- why was the information povided by the source published?
This is an example of analysis which contains all the normal passages that we do in a textual research in a library for example.
There are also useful tools that we may learn because they will help us for the preparation of our final thesis:
Google Blogs: it is similar to Technorati. Google will search for you tags inside the blogs on the Internet. Google Books: you cannot copy or print the material published but you can read some extracts from a number of on-line books! Google Scholar: Google will search documents and academic texts which could satisfy your criteria.
I really didn't know these tools and I'm having fun in searching information because I really understand that as the web is so full of information we should use the right method in order to find what we really want!
No comments:
Post a Comment