Module 5 - General

Well I have completed reading module 5, and my essay yipee!

When I came into this course, I was keen to get started, but did not see that a course covering basics like FTP or email communications, searching etc was going to be of much practical use to me, given that I have worked with these tools for years. However I am pleased to say that I was wrong, while I possibly found some of the more technical exercises a little easier than those with less practical experience, I found that they lead on very nicely into a more advanced exploration of the Net.

I think the most important lesson for me was that if I want a career based around the Internet, then I am going to have to change some of my practices. Using the same tried and trusted methods may be OK some times, but failing to constantly reevaluate these practices, taking 'another' look at whats out there and ignoring the vast untapped masses of hidden information on the Deep Web is not .

So just like to place my last post here for the Net11 Learning Log and say that I am looking forward to continuing studies in this field and eventually completing the BA Internet Studies. Thank you for the wake up call and for the interesting paths in which you have led me down

kind regards
Lisa Findlater

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.

Module 4 Tasks - Boolean Searching

Boolean Searching

• the biggest number of hits relating to these key words

To get a result with the biggest number of hits, I would use a search engines such as google, or MSN and type in the phrase advance internet users, without any quotes or qualifiers. This way any of those three words could appear anywhere on a resource and it would show up in your results. I searched for advanced internet users skills based and got 2.9 million results.

I don't think this was too useful as far as quality of results, so I put quotes around the search "advanced internet users" +skills based and got 2650 results, a lot ore useful!

• sources relating to skills-based information on these key words.

I used an online meta-search tool (ixquick) for this search, and the search was executed as follows +advanced +internet +users +skills based. I ended up with 43 unique top-ten pages selected from at least 4,969,422 matching results. A quick perusal of the results, seemed to have picked up a good selection of resources relevant to the search phrase I entered.
I also tried Internet +skills +advanced +users. I picked up some of the same results but there where some different pages returned with the results including 46 unique top-ten pages selected from at least 5,609,444 matching results.

• information coming only from university sources

For this search I used the same search term as above, ixquick also allows you to narrow down the results by domain so I selected .edu domains only. This resulted in 29 unique top-ten pages selected from at least 73,464 matching results.

To get results that where more academic focused, I also did a search on Google Scholar for the same search term, and narrowed it down to articles that where Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics based only. I ended up with 24,000 results for this search.

Module 4 Tasks - Meta search

Using Copernic

After downloading and installing copernic, it did no take too long to get it up and working. I set up my search preferences for the web to include all 16 search engines currently included (if you want to include others you have to purchase a license), I also set the search preference to look at the first 50 results for each search engine. The search engines included can be seen in the image below;

I then did a search for advanced Internet users and selected the option to look for the exact phrase, which is similar to putting quotes around your search phrase. The results where as follows.

The first hit was

Still the same as the google search carried out in a previous post.

Advanced Internet Users Tutorial - CIESE
http://www.k12science.org/tutorials/advanced/

The number of hits was

The biggest difference was in the number of results compared with the google search , it was 218. Guess I am restricting the search to only 50 per search engines, so given the 16 search engines a possible 800 results was trimmed to 218 as a result of duplicate results from the different sites.

The biggest benefit seems to be saving the time you would normally spend trawling through the different search engines just to find those three or four sites that only appear on certain engines. The Copernic tool also appears to have a lot of other useful utilities for web research, but I could not fully evaluate these as you need to buy a license to take advantage of these features.

The top 5 results where;

http://www.k12science.org/tutorials/advanced/
http://www3.uwm.edu/sce/course.cfm?id=6835
http://www.rockymtnweb.com/free/advanced/index.htm
http://www.cln.org/guidebooks.html
http://www.msen.com/1997/adv_links.html

Module 4 Tasks - Search Engines

Using google to search for - advanced internet users

The first hit was

Advanced Internet Users Tutorial - CIESE

Choosing a link below will bring you to a web page that describes a specific procedure or aspect of browsing the internet. This tutorial ultimately directs ...
www.k12science.org/tutorials/advanced/ - 16k -Cached - Similar pages


The number of hits was

117,000,000

Using google to search for - "advanced internet users" (with quotes)

The first hit was

same as above

The number of hits was

18,500 (using quotes narrows the search as the phrase must appear in its entirety to be picked up in the results)

Module 4 Tasks - Downloading Tools/plug-ins

1. Adobe PDF Reader - already had this one, and I'm setup to automatically check for updates and prompt for installation.
2. Flash/Shockwave - yep have those as well
3. Have all the media players installed already (have a teenager that loves her music!!)
4. Installed Copernic Meta but have not had a chance to really use yet.
5. Installed two firefox plug-ins Scrapbook and Zotero, they perform similar functions on top of the bookmark management tool. Scrapbook has the best capture facility as it allows you to just highlight part of a website and capture to your hard drive very easily retaining its original format. However I prefer Zotero's file structure capability, and the ability to tag your saved pages and attach notes to them. I find using a combination of both tools works really well for me.
6. As mentioned in point 5 Zotero and Scrapbook cover the Offline browser copying function.

Module 3 Tasks - Blogging Tips

1. Don't get too hung up on the form, it more about the content.
2. Write about a subject that really interests you, your more likely to keep at it.
3. Get involved - look at other blogs, visit sites like Technorati, it will get you inspired for your own blogging
4. Use your blog for good bloghopper :-) (don't use it as a forum to abuse others anonymously thinking you'll get away with it, more than likely it will catch up with you in the end!)
5. In the end it is what you make it, it can be for family and friends or you can open it to every man and his dog, you are in control, if you want to be!!