If I was to use Google to search for statistics or country profile. I don’t think I can found any resources we have used. When you use Google to search for topics, it brings up a lot of results and you have to narrow it down. Although for me, I just pick the first result that sound interesting. I feel that some student used internet to do a research because it fast and quick and we don’t have time to sit and read through all article. We sometime don’t seem to care if the source is reliable or not as long we get the answered we need. Majority of the source provide different answered. Information is everywhere on the Internet, existing in large quantities and continuously being created and revised. This information exists in a large variety of kinds (facts, opinions, stories, interpretations, and statistics) and is created for many purposes (to inform, to persuade, to sell, to present a viewpoint, and to create or change an attitude or belief). For each of these various kinds and purposes, information exists on many levels of quality and reliability. For the past few week of our discussion, we have talk about evaluating resources. I Google search on Evaluating Internet Research Sources and it is from http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm. They were small advertising in the middle of the page and bottom of the page.
The information on this website was published for educating purpose use and how to determine the credibility and accuracy of a website. On the top left hand corner it provide author name, version date and perversion date. The end of the information it provides a little detail about the author of the website. The author of this site provided information on criteria, techniques, and objectivity for evaluating websites.
I can see what you are saying about picking the first Google search, worded right to suit ones preconceived notion of the answer. It is a tricky thing, in that there are so many pages of information out there that one can get a "Yes Man" response out of almost any question posed.
ReplyDeleteYou almost have to know the source you're looking for when you do a Google search. That's really the only way I've ever made good use of that search engine. Sometimes when I can't find a specific full article in a database, I'll try my luck by searching for it in Google using the citation source, and about half of the time I get lucky. So, I guess it can be useful in that way.
ReplyDeleteThat is an interesting site you have referenced. I wouldn't have thought to look at that site, but after reading through the page you linked to, it has some pretty good information. For example, when searching on the web, the author of the site, Robert Harris, advises to:
ReplyDeleteTry to select sources that offer as much of the following information as possible:
Author's Name
Author's Title or Position
Author's Organizational Affiliation
Date of Page Creation or Version
Author's Contact Information
Some of the Indicators of Information Quality...
This is all common sense, yet good, advice for looking for sources on the web.