What's good and what's bad in the Web

[Photo by Google Images]

Hi, girls!
This week we aren’t supposed to learn new tools, but to reflect on how we judge the huge amount of information we find in the Net. We experienced the Net’s vastness in these two months. In our e-tivities, we were always surprised at the difficulty we found in choosing podcasts, websites, videos and blogs, just because there were too many of them!
Hopefully, we’ll soon begin writing our thesis and the Web will be maybe the main source we’ll use. Now the obvious question is: how can we judge the right source for us? I mean, we should understand what could be useful and what not. Before reading the websites Sarah suggested, I wanted to reflect on what I usually do when I have to find a piece of information in the Web. I thought about my recent experience, when I had to write my final dissertation to take my first degree. I must admit I found many difficulties because it was the first time I did a bibliographical research. I didn’t know where to start. The problem was that the Spanish author I had to write about wasn’t so famous in Italy, so there weren’t many books about him in the libraries. My only solution was the Web. I was quite lucky because there’s the website of his foundation, where I could find many useful links to other sources, always related to his works and life. But the difficulty here was to decide what kind of information I needed. Basically, I searched for documents written by academic writers but what I evaluated at most was the content. I wondered if the content could deal with the topic of my dissertation and that was all.
But reading the websites Sarah suggested, I found out that my evaluating skills were rather inadequate. My main problem is that my skills at computer are basic and I still haven’t found my feet with search engines: I simply open Google, type some keywords and then visit the first two or three sites that appears (I’ve always thought they should be the most relevant!). I knew there was the possibility of doing an advanced research, specifying what kind of information I wanted, but I didn’t know the domain names I was supposed to use. Now I discovered that if I need –for example- a website run by a government agency, I should type .gov. Then I didn’t know that specialized search engines existed: I had a look at Google scholar, a search engine aimed at academics, and then I found Google book, a search engine which only searches for books. I also tried the meta-search engine called Mamma. It’s the “mother of all search engines” and searches “other search engines and give you the most relevant returns from each” (to read the whole article, click here). I tried typing “Francisco Ayala” -the Spanish author about whom I should write my theses- both in Google and in Mamma. I was rather surprised when I saw the results of my search: I had more than 2 millions of returns by Google, while by Mamma I had only 33 returns!
I never thought that there could be so many things to take into consideration to evaluate a Web source. It could be really time demanding but I think that it’s the only solution if we want to get out of the huge amount of information avaiable in the Web!

See you next week!

Have a nice week end!

Martina