Hi everyone..
today I would like to start with a little reflection on information. Like Pirandello said, absolute truth does not exist! It all depends on the point of view from which one sees things. This concept can be applied to the world of information: anytime we read or hear something, we need to stop and consider who is writing or saying it, in what context, for what reasons, when he or she did it. Culture, political believes, purposes are some of the factors that necessarily determine how people perceive things, and, as a consequence, how they report them. In this perspective, the concepts of reliabilility and trustfulness of the sources are relative.
During last week's lesson we reflected on this issue; we asked ourselves how can we evaluate the reliability of online sources. What I wrote above is even more relevant if we consider online information: since anyone can publish online, we have to be really careful and spend even more time thinking of what kind of source we are dealing with. The greatest revolution brought about by the Internet is the fact that we have access to an enormously greater number of sources. This is why we need to learn how to choose and filter them.
In class we were asked to think of the aspects we usually consider when we evaluate an online source. Generally, we agreed on the fact that we need to consider who is the author, if we can consider him/her authoritative in the field, if he/she is cited in other sources; then, what is the domain of the website, if the content is reliable...
Later we took a look at some University's recommendation. This gave us a larger perspective, and gave us some suggestions. For example, San Diego State University suggests to consider the date of the document, if the document has been updated or modified, and the reason why it has been written. I had never really paid attention to these issues before.
Besides making me more aware of the fact that I need to analyse the sources I am consulting more carefully, this lesson showed me some new tools I didn't know about, like google blogs, google books, google scholar, DOAJ (directory of open access journals). Hopefully, these tools will be useful for me, not only when I'll be writing my final thesis, but anytime I'll consult an online source!
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Hi Valentina! I guess you don't know me because I joined Sarah Guth's class later this semester; I was doing an internship in Ireland, and I finished on the 27th March :(
RispondiEliminaAnyway, I read your post and I totally agree with what you wrote. The Internet can sometimes be a bad source of information if one doesn't adopt any criteria when doing research on the web. As you wrote, last week's lesson with Sarah Guth was very useful because we got to know some new tools, like Google Books and Google scholar. I reckon these will be very handy for us, especially when we'll be working on our final dissertation!
Bye Serena