The Sea of Strangers

How many times have we said to someone, or thought to say, "hey man, who are you?", especially when discussing issues of certain importance? To be "somebody" means to be a person who is held in high esteem by others and who has something important to say or to do in the world. While looking for information on the Web, as well as in everyday-life, it's always better to ask ourselves this question to avoid trusting someone who is not very reliable and thus ending up with loads of useless rubbish.

This week in class we talked about the way in which we usually surf the Web when searching for information, e. g. for an academic research study. The Web is an amazing source of information where people can take an active part by using tools like the Creative Commons (e.g. the big family of the Wikis) or by creating personal environments like blogs or websites. There we can find lots docs and links to what we are looking for and some of these even seem to be very attractive but..are they all reliable? We made a list of the parameters a document should match to be considered a good source of information. First of all its author should be someone qualified to write that article like a scientist, an academic or a student supported by a professor. It should provide enough references in order to allow people to go and leaf through other sources like books or on-line documents- when writing an academic research study students usually start from infos available on the Web and little by little narrow down the field to the old good dusty books. Then we'd better pay attention to the date it was created, since too old an article can prove to be not very useful (the world changes so fast that even today is tomorrow's yesterday!). The list could go on and on since there are loads of criteria to take into consideration and soooo many kinds of topics floating on the Websea, but luckily here they come some nice tools that help us out with our doc hunting! Google Blogs, Google Books and Google Scholar are invaluable allies in fishing out and skimming what we need! They are similar to the most famous Google search but take the searching one step further. The first Google focuses on blogs: just have to type a keyword ("language learning" or anything else) and you'll discover what people are saying on that subject! The second one again works just like web search helping you to find books and giving a preview or even showing the entire text (if out of copyright)..what a nice idea! The last one searches for scholarly literature and helps to identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
Well guys, I think that our teacher was right on target again!
About me, what can I say? Now I have no more excuses for not beginning to work on my thesis (yes, it's high time I began writing on it!). I have all the tools I may need, I'm home and dry you'd say..well, can you tell me now where I could find a good idea for my thesis too:-)?

Anna

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