Thinking about what we have found!

By now everyone has heard the terms “Internet”, “World Wide Web”. It seems you can’t pick up a magazine or watch news without them being mentioned somewhere. There is so much information across the Internet and the Web can link together info from anywhere in the world and make it available to anyone. A high school student can jump from The Times’ financial report to a pictorial tour of Russia’s capital, Moscow, to wild scenery of central Africa – without even leaving his desk.

The Internet has brought so much to society. It helps a great number of people to express themselves, find one another, exchange ideas, discover possible peers worldwide they never would have otherwise met, and, through hypertext links in web pages, suggest so many other people's ideas and personalities to anyone who comes and clicks. And that's great treasure.

Having access to huge amounts of information is part of the Internet’s

charm, but perhaps only a small part; more significant is the ability to find, view

and make use of the information. You can move around the world as easily as to

the local library just with a click of a mouse.

The World Wide Web is a great place to accomplish research on many topics, you can find research documents, encyclopedia entry or any other information almost on any subject. For many students traveling to a library to find this information has become a near obsolete venture. Instead, they prefer using the Web.

But there is one thing – you have to evaluate carefully whatever you find on the Web. Documents can easily be copied and falsified or copied with omissions and errors - intentional or accidental. In the general World Wide Web there are no editors (unlike most print publications) to proofread and "send it back" or "reject it" until it meets the standards of a publishing house's reputation. Quality of Web resources varies tremendously. Anyone can put articles on the Web. How do you know whether the information is reliable and free of error?

Moreover most pages are designed with some purpose in mind. Businesses, small or large, advertise and sell products and services; mass media’s primary purpose is to provide extremely current information. Their URL addresses frequently end in .com (commercial). Political parties, interest groups and other non-profit organizations put forward and advocate their ideas attempting to influence public opinion. Their URL extensions will frequently be .org. Education and government institutions design web pages with the motive to present factual information such as statistical data, directories, transport schedules, annual reports. Their addresses often end in .edu, .gov or even country codes. The two letters at the end of any internet address indicate the country of origin (except for the United States), e.g., .ru stands for Russia, .ua – for Ukraine, .sz stands for Switzerland.

A great number of web pages are published by individuals who may or may

not be affiliated* with a large institution. This doesn’t mean they are necessarily ‘bad’ but it takes time to double-check, in other words, to gather the evidence on the quality of the information in the web site. Though the URL addresses may have a variety of endings, a personal name (sbaker or baker) following a tilde (~), a percent sign (%) or the words “users”, “members” or “peoples” is frequently embedded somewhere in the URL. It is the reader who establishes the validity, authority, accuracy, timeliness, integrity and objectivity of what you find and is intended to use. Using the Web as a Research Tool has become nowadays a real challenge. Remember that you are looking for quality not quantity!

(Adapted from the Internet sites)

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Дата добавления: 2015-11-14