Module 4 Tasks - Organising Web Research and Evaluating the Web

CIESE. (2000). Advance Internet User Tutorial. Retrieved May 6, 2007, from
http://www.k12science.org/tutorials/advanced/

This website is a great learning reference for new internet users. It is has been created as a tool for school age children, but would be a good reference for new users at any age. It covers a variety of topics on using your web browser, including customising toolbars. saving pages to view off line, bookmarking and clearing your cache. It also explains concepts such as cookies and how to locate website if the original address you where given results in a 404 error message. The tutorial is backed up by graphical examples and practice exercises to reinforce the concept being covered.

Community Learning Network. (n.d.). Internet Guidebooks. Retrieved May 6, 2007, from
http://www.cln.org/guidebooks.html

The Community Learning Network provides a technology based services to the teaching community, with over 5000 annotated links to website with useful educational components. The Internet Guidebooks page focuses on resource aimed at helping the beginner to advance Internet user, increased their Internet skills. Some of the reference include on this page are site on preparing effective email, "how to" web page design sites, and Internet glossary of terms. These websites have already been reviewed and annotated providing a good reference site for new users.

RockyMTNWeb. (2007). For More Advanced Internet Users. Retrieved May 6, 2007, from http://www.rockymtnweb.com/free/advanced/index.htm

Rocky MTN Web is a commercially based Internet Service Provider. The "For More Advanced Internet Users" web page, provides links to pages on a variety of subjects. Some of the tutorials and help pages are provided by the web hosting company, others are links to external sites providing relevant information for example the internet glossary site link is to http://www.matisse.net/files/glossary.html. The page on anti virus tips is very useful and easy to understand, as is the "beginners Guide" for getting around the Internet. A useful resource, although not so much for the Advanced User as the title would suggest.

Recording My Web Research

To record and index these sites, I used a product called Zotero (it can be downloaded from the mozilla add-ons page). Zotero provides the following functionality.

1. Firstly I can snapshot the page, taking a copy of the current site and saving it too my hard drive.
2. I can fill in an information tab with the relevant referencing information (i.e. author, date created etc,) Zotero automatically saves the date and time that I retrieve the page.
3. Zotero provides a tag feature, so I can tag the page I have just snapshotted, with relevant keywords, there is also a related to option, in which I can link this page to other pages or notes that I have created to indicate their is a relationship between these resources.
4. I can create separate notes that can be linked to the snapshot of the website.

Final Observations

I believe that recording and annotating my reference in this way, especially pages or articles that I know I will want to go back to in the future, is a much more efficient way than simply bookmarking a site using browser standard bookmarks. The annotated snapshots are definitely going to be a lot more useful to me for further research and assignments. I think recording the relevant referencing information at the time and taking a few notes, will mean you are more likely to reference in the future.

Before this exercise , I used to search for information reference it then forget it, only to have to spend more time searching again for the same information some time down the track. This will definitely, stop any time wasting when it comes to Net research. A little pain now in properly collating and referencing these resources will in the long run make the whole exercise worthwhile.