Hi guys!
I tried to deal with some academic articles today, asking myself whether they were reliable or not. I can say it was quite a difficult task! After choosing one of them (retrieved from http://www.webasa.org/crossroads.htm - http://www.webasa.org/Pubblicazioni/Ropelato_2007_1.pdf), I first looked for information about the author: in the article itself there were some details, including the name of a university but without its location and her email address; then I "googled" her and it just showed me links to conferences she participated; finally, I searched in Delicious, finding no results. However, Delicious suggested me to 'search on the web', redirecting my request in YahooSearch. It was there I found a link to another article that quoted my author, explaining she is a professor at the University of Florence! What a hard work! I must admit I hate this kind of searches: they drive me completely mad! Concerning all the other questions to validate the article, they were a little bit easier to answer to, most of them depending upon my own reading of it. Unfortunately, there was no abstract in the site so I tried to read quickly the article, focusing on the first, the last and the central parts because I believe they are the most important ones. I guessed some hypothesis about the goal of the research and its findings. On the contrary the dates were clearly stated.
I can conclude affirming that the questions made in class and these ones related to academic writings are quite similar because their focus is the same: validate a text to consider it reliable. However, I think it is impossible to follow the whole of the process for every source we use in our work. Sometimes it would be better to save time and judge the stuff using our own wisdom.
Sara
Learning with youtube
17 anni fa
Hi Sara! I'm Anna Faggian and I'a new member of your blogging group, so I'm going to comment your posts every week!I am satisfied with what we did in class last week and found all the sources Sarah gave us very useful. Anyway, I did a research for "personal learning environment" and found a lot of materials, blogs and academic papers. I agree with you that it takes really a lot of time to check if the materials we find on the net is reliable or not. And since when you google something you get a lot of pages as entries, you need a lot of time and energy to check all the information!I admit that I'm not so precise and I usually take into consideration just few of them. Maybe I should find a better system to work more efficently when I search some pieces of information on the net. I agree with you! Bye bye,
RispondiEliminaAnna Faggian.
Hey, there's a new girl with us! Nice thing, united we stand:-)!
RispondiEliminaAs far as critical reading concerns,I'm definitely going crazy!! Maybe today it's not my lucky day and I'm really getting annoyed with Web sounding.Today my laptop doesn't cooperate,it doesn't allow me to open and download pdf files (why not,yesterday you did it,unfaithful creature!!),and the few available in html format need to be purchased to be viewed! So, I've been surfing the Internet in vain for nearly four hours,what a hassle!!! I don't know yet how difficult can be a critical source analysis, but I think it is a lot, since I'm not able even to find an article to go through! In my opinion, you did a good job,mainly because you didn't give up in your searching:-)!! I'll try again later, hope I'll be luckier!
Bye