EVALUATING WEB SOURCES

Currently, evaluating sources is a keen problem because information, knowledge, news, research spread all over the world and from any part of the world. Nowadays if you need to look for information about a specific topic, be it in the library or online, you will find out plenty of different materials about it and many times literature about it offers contrastive views of the point. So, how can we manage our research in this riddle of information? What are the criteria on which we can judge the reliability and trustworthiness of a piece of information?
First of all, I think that we have to make a basic distinction between the two most important kinds of sources of information: sources on paper (i.e. books, newspaper, reviews etc.) and online sources (i.e. websites, blogs, online encyclopaedias etc.). The task of evaluating “paper” sources is quite straightforward. I mean, you have to consider the author, whether it is well-known or not, the date of publication to understand if the information is updated, the publishing house. Then, you can leaf through the bibliography at the end of the book in order to find references of other authors who deal with the same topic and check if those authors mention the one you’re interested in. You can have a look at the footnotes as well in order to see which sources the author uses in order to give evidence to his assumptions. In the end, you can look for reviews about the book on Internet or on encyclopaedias in order to know what other authors think about the book you’re interested in.
As far as evaluating online sources is concerned, the task is undoubtedly more complex. I must admit that I have never relied completely on information found out on the Internet. I mean, I read through it and judge it but, then, I tend to search for corroboration in books or encyclopaedias. However, the Web nowadays is a powerful source of information, maybe the most updated one, and so people should know at least some basic criteria to critically judge the information they are managing. Talking about this, I’d suggest you a couple on interesting web sites on the topic: Evaluating Internet Sources and Evaluation Criteria. Since anyone can put up whatever he/she wants on Internet, a list of simple criteria is very useful in order not to accept whatever you find.
Now, I’ll try to give you some handy tips on the topic but mind that these are only the starting point because the issue is wider and wider.
1. READ THROUGH A LOT OF WEBSITES. Visiting only a website is not enough to have a thorough approach on the topic. Reading through a lot of different websites on the topic will help you to avoid subjectivity, partiality and narrow-minded view on the topic.
2. CHECK THE URL. The URL of a website as well can give you some primary information about the website (i.e. the domain .edu, .com, .org will show you whether the website comes from an authoritative organization or not.)
3. CHECK AUTHORITY. The first thing to do when you’re visiting a website is to find the name of the author, his credential, the name of the sponsoring organization and to verify if the author can be easily reached by the users. In other words, is there somebody who is responsible for the information given in the website?
4. CHECK CURRENCY. Look at the date and check out when the website was updated for the last time. The more information in the website is updated, the more the website can be considered reliable. One more thing, also the number of rating (high or low) is very important.
5. CHECK ACCURACY. A good website is the one that gives information and it is able to give information about its sources of information as well. I mean, a website has to provide with references to other websites, a thorough bibliography and links to other information about the topic.
6. THINK ABOUT THE GOAL OF THE WEBSITE. Obviously, any website has a specific goal to achieve. The aim of a website is really important because it influences the choice of information to give and the way to convey it.
Hope I'll help you to think a bit about the problem of evaluating web sources!
Let me have all your comments…
Elena

YOU TUBE: PROs & CONs

Hi guys!
First of all, I want to thank Sarah and our English course because I finally discover what You Tube is and how it works. Sadly, You Tube is well known from the news on TV: often stupid pranks and silly tricks among teenagers are shot with mobile phones by boys and published on You Tube where everyone can watch them. Recently, parents of disabled children discovered violence and abuses on their sons thanks to videos in You Tube. Some days ago, two students used the camera of their mobile phone to shoot one of their classmates while she was ran down by a bus. The girl died in the accident and their friends published the video on You Tube. I have no words when something like that happens…
Even if You Tube nowadays is on everyone’s lips, I’m not ashamed to confess that I visited it last Wednesday in the lab for the first time. I thought it was something different: greater, more eye-catching… I don’t know but I was struck by its simplicity and its clear layout. I watched some videos: some of them are funny, others are ironic or satiric, others are quite witty and others are simply stupid and senseless. I think that this is the main danger of a video sharing tool like You Tube: you can find whatever you want there and so you have to be very careful when you’re looking for something. I mean, I don’t believe that You Tube is always a dangerous tool: the problem is that tools like it need to be used and visited with a critical eye but, often, the greatest amount of its users are teenagers or even children who are not aware of all its potentialities and its risks. So, maybe it is right that people could publish whatever they want on it, but users should be aware of it and they should remember that a critical approach is always necessary in order not to be simply enchanted by it. As far as my language learning is concerned, I think that You Tube as well can be a useful tool because in the majority of the videos people speak English and, especially, colloquial and informal English.
Before adding a comment, please have a look at the nice video I found out in You Tube. It’s a small cat waking up. It is so tender… If you don’t guess it from my choice of the video, cats are my favourite animals!
Enjoy it!

Elena

SWEET CATS...

PODCASTS: HOW TO HAVE AN ENGLISH SPEAKER ALWAYS WITH YOU!

Hi guys!

Today I'm going to talk a little bit about PODCASTS... Do you know what is a podcast? No?!? Don't worry, I realized what was a podcast more or less one week ago. A podcast is an online audio file which you can either listen to in the Internet or download on your PC or MP3 player and use it whenever you want. Podcasts deal with any topic and, serching the Web, you will find out any kind of podcasts related to the topic you are interested in. As far as my language learning is concerned, I think that using podcast is a clear example of how technologies can be used wisely nowadays depending on our specific needs. In this case, we, as students of English, can take advantage of these digital files and, by listening to them, we can have a chance to improve our listening skills, our pronunciation of English and even also our speaking skill. Up to a certain extent, podcasts - but also other Internet facilities - help us to become more indipendent and self-organized students because we can plan our language learning step by step by ourselves and have a chance to personalize our studying also outside the English class. But, obviously, podcasts cannot be a substitute for our daily involvement in speaking English directly and joining conversations in English. Podcast are a wonderful tool but they lack what is essential in a conversation between people, that is INTERACTION. It's true that, downloading the podcasts on your MP3 player or IPod, you can listen to them whenever you want and it's like having an English friend always accompanying us and talking to us. But we have to bear in mind that in this kind of thing there is only one voice speaking - the other one - and our role is basically passive because we just have to try to understand but we don't have to prove that we really understood what we were listening to.

Actually, I spent the last two hours in surfing the net to find out interesting websites that contain podcasts related to English learning and education. I must admit that it was quite hard to find specific websites because the Web offers a large amount of different stuff. In the end, I subscribed to 3 websites: two provide with podcasts in English on a wide range of topics and the other one is specific for people interested in learning and improving Business English. The first one is called China 232 A Fun and Free Way to learn English where you can find podcasts on different topics, serious and funny, to listen to or download. Each podcast is enriched with comments and explanations on the most important sentences or idiomatic expressions. The second website is Better@English where the English podcasts are also collected separatedly depending on your level of English: Intermediate, Upper-intermediate and Advanced. The last one, ESL Business News offers a weekly podcast of international business news read in a clear English and each podcast is accompanied by the script of the audio file.

I think this can be enough for now,

I hope you'll appreciate my suggestions. Let me know something about it!

Elena

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Social Bookmarking is the last thing I was pleased to discover on the Web. Actually, I'd already heard about it but, to be honest, I had never cared about finding out what social bookmarking was. Thanks to our last lesson in the lab, I became acquainted with Del.icio.us, a free online software for Social Bookmarking, and I started to appreciate its usefullness. Social Bookmarking is a tool that enables you to subscribe your favourite websites online, to store them online and to share them with other people. Two advantages of Social Bookmarking are quite manifest. The first one is that with Social Bookmarking you are provided with a list of your favourites online and so you can consult it from any computer without losing information. The other one is implicit in the adjective "social": as your favourites can be seen by anybody and you can share information about interesting websites with other people, you can also take advantage of what the other people had already looked for on the internet and follow their suggestions. As far as I'm concerned, I think that Social Bookmarking is some kind of reciprocal exchange of information between people where if you are interesting in looking for something on the Web, you can also have a look at what the other people suggest about the same topic. Moreover, Social Bookmarking plays the role of filtering the huge amount of information that you can find on the Web dealing with a specific topic. Thanks to the notes given by the people who previously visited the website, you can have a general idea of the website you're interested in and then decide to log on or simply to quit and try another one.

As far as my personal research is concerned, I must admit that I found Social Bookmarking very useful. If you look for something with Social Bookmarking, you're already provided with a list of selected websites on the topic and so you don't have to spend a lot of time screening and switching from a website to the other in order to finally find out the one that really matches with you personal interests.

Talking about our e-tivity, I took quite a lot of time visiting the suggested websites and I believe that the majority of them are really really interesting for our language learning purposes. I chose my tags thinking about my weaknesses in English and some aspects of the language that I would like to improve. Therefore, I subscribed an online Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs because I think that the more you learn them, the less you're confident with them. Then, I listed a Dictionary of Idioms and Idiomatic expressions too because idioms are among the funniest and most captivating aspects of a language and there are always a lot of things to learn about them. The third website, the Phrases Finder, is linked with the previous two because it still talks about idioms and phrases but it also gives you the explanation of their origin. I think it's quite an interesting and stimulating thing, isn't it? The last two websites are less specific: the first one is a collection of online exercises to test our language abilities while the other websites provides a series of listening activities to keep up with our listening skills.

I really enjoyed reading the websites' choice of the other members in my group. I noticed that we focused more or less on the same aspects of language learning, maybe because they are the most difficult ones. For instance, Sivia and I chose the same websites on idioms or idiomatic expressions and listening activities while Zara selected the Phrase Finder website that I mentioned before. Just one word for Giada's choice; she subscribed a websites dealing with how to use English punctuation properly: it was quite detailed and exhaustive, I really appreciated it. In the end, Letizia found out a website called English Club about how to learn English and teach English and I analysed the section dealing with "How to teach English" deeply since I'm managing with my first experience as a teacher of English.

I hope you'll appreciate my post and I'm looking forward to reading your opinion about Social Bookmarking...

Bye!

Elena

FEEDS AND FEED AGGREGATORS

Hello to everybody!
I must admit that this adventure in the blogosphere is becoming more and more fascinating. One of the major problems I had during these first weeks managing blogs was the amount of time that I spent in front of the computer’s screen in order to find the piece of information I want. I mean… Whenever I logged on Internet, I had to check all the blogs of the people in my group to read the new posts and their comments to my posts. This task was quite time-demanding! The use of feed aggregators is a wonderful solution in order to save time and avoid getting crazy switching from one blog to another. Bloglines is a free online feed aggregator where you can subscribe the websites and blogs that you visit the most and the feed aggregator informs you when new information is added to those sites and gives you a little summary or the complete version of the new article or posts. The opportunity of creating playlists in Bloglines is another handy help to your online research: in your playlist you subscribe all the blogs or websites that belong to the same group, for example all the blogs of the people in my group, Group C. In this way, I can always have an overall view of all the new posts published by the other members of my group without wasting time in leafing through one personal blog to the other. Fantastic!
Enjoy and spare time using feed aggregators!