Once found, never lost!

Hello everybody!

Did you image that you could lose youself in a virtual place, too?And that sometimes this is so easy?...

I found the task about evaluating online sources really very interesting. I already knew some of the criteria you should follow to decide whether online information is trustworthy or not. Specifically, I always follow these basic rules:

-who is the author? Is s/he known?If not, could s/he de considered authoritative?

-do cross-referencing to see if you can find the same information in other places

-once found a trustworthy source, I use links in it because I presume these are trustworthy, too.

However, in class we pointed out other criteria that you have to keep in mind when searching the Web. Besides that, our English teacher showed us some tools where you are provided with information already filtered. I find them very useful,and by now I'm going to use them often and often. The Web is so wide that it's impossible that you find what you want immediately. Searching Google Blogs, Google Books, and Google Scholar you know what kind of information you retrieve: blogs, books, or academic writings and articles. Finally, it's quite obvious that the importance of these three sources changes in accordance to the work I'm doing. If you have to write your thesis it's much better if you search for books and authoritative articles (even if reliable information can be found in blogs, too); on the contrary, if you want for example to see how language is used on the blogosphere, it's better if you go through other blogs. Once you retrieved the information that interests you, you can then save it as a bookmark on Delicious. In this way, you can have a look at it whenever you want, wherever you are, thus avoiding losing time, or, even worse ... losing yourself on the Web!!!

I'm curious to know what you think about it! By now it's time to retrieve the material for my thesis!

See you soon,

Michela