Evaluating Internet Research Sources Robert Harris Version Date: January 21, 2015 Previous: December 27, 2013; November 6, 2013; Nov. 22, 2010 and June 15, 2007 "The central work of life is interpretation." --Proverb Introduction: The Diversity of Information Adopting a Skeptical Attitude You might have heard of the term information warfare, the use of information as a weapon. Getting Started: Screening Information Source Selection Tip: Try to select sources that offer as much of the following information as possible: Author's Name Author's Title or Position Author's Organizational Affiliation Date of Page Creation or Version Author's Contact Information Some of the Indicators of Information Quality (listed below) Evaluating Information: The Tests of Information Quality The CARS Checklist for Information Quality Summary of The CARS Checklist for Research Source Evaluation Living with Information: The CAFÉ Advice Books you need:
How to Test For One Hundred Percent Truth - the 3 Emergence Truth Tests This article was written only months before I discovered the map of the mind. And while these ideas are still true, our standards for accessing truth have since been raised a thousand fold. More important, in 2010, I began work on a new scientific method, one with which discoveries are guaranteed. This method also contains a far more stringent test for truth. This said, this article is still important in that is shows the relationships between my work on mind and consciousness, emergence personality theory, and emergence therapy. It also shows how anything posited had (and still has to) test as true from all three prospectives; from the view of the mind, from the perspective of personality, and as part of a working therapy. On What Do We Base Our Three Emergence Based Theories? The First Truth Test - the Two Geometries (the meta truth test) Socrates had four main areas of study. Logically, one cannot fault Socrates here. Truth for Socrates was a much purer goal. Why this order? Steven
Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask 1. What can the URL tell you? Techniques for Web Evaluation : 1. 2. 2. 1. INSTRUCTIONS for Truncating back a URL: In the top Location Box, delete the end characters of the URL stopping just before each / (leave the slash). Continue this process, one slash (/) at a time, until you reach the first single / which is preceded by the domain name portion. 3. Check the date on all the pages on the site. 3. 1. What kinds of publications or sites are they? Are they real? 3. Expect a journal article, newspaper article, and some other publications that are recent to come from the original publisher IF the publication is available on the web. Look at the bottom of such articles for copyright information or permissions to reproduce. 4. 1. a. Type or paste the URL into alexa.com's search box. b. 1. The pages listed all contain one or more links to the page you are looking for. If you find no links, try a shorter portion of the URL, stopping after each /. 2. 5. 1. 2. WHY? More About Evaluating Web Sources
Personal information management Personal information management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use personal information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person’s various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.). There are six ways in which information can be personal: [1] Owned by "me"About "me"Directed toward "me"Sent/Posted by "me"Experienced by "me"Relevant to "me" One ideal of PIM is that people should always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet their current need. History and background[edit] Although PIM is a relatively new field, information management began in spoken word; people would use mnemonics as PIM for the human memory. [1] Tools[edit] Study[edit] Related activities and areas[edit]
Crap Detection 101 | City Brights: Howard Rheingold “Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.” Ernest Hemingway, 1954 The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge – the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. “Ask a few questions and use available tools to see if you can find answers,” is what I told her when she asked me how to go about investigating.
A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop “More is better.” From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes. Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. What drives this paradoxical finding? Wrong again.
Evaluating Internet Research Sources Introduction: The Diversity of Information Information is a Commodity Available in Many Flavors Think about the magazine section in your local grocery store. If you reach out with your eyes closed and grab the first magazine you touch, you are about as likely to get a supermarket tabloid as you are a respected journal (actually more likely, since many respected journals don't fare well in grocery stores). Welcome to the Internet. Information Exists on a Continuum of Reliability and Quality Information is everywhere on the Internet, existing in large quantities and continuously being created and revised. Getting Started: Screening Information Pre-evaluation The first stage of evaluating your sources takes place before you do any searching. Select Sources Likely to be Reliable Source Selection Tip:Try to select sources that offer as much of the following information as possible: Evaluating Information: The Tests of Information Quality Reliable Information is Power Source Evaluation is an Art
5 Reasons You Should Keep All Your Notes in One Place Do you ever find yourself searching for that one note that you know you wrote down somewhere? Perhaps, it is a last-minute frantic search for a piece of information that you need. Or you have been endlessly searching for days for that missing document. You need to keep your notes in one place. Where are Your Notes? A complete time management system includes many productivity tools. You need the ability to capture notes and pieces of information. A common trap is to write notes everywhere. Simply put, the more places you take notes… the more places you have to look later when you need a piece of information. A better solution is to record all of your notes in one place, one tool. Here are 5 Reasons You Should Always Keep Your Notes in One Place: Reduced Cutter – If your desk is covered in notebooks, pads, and loose pieces of paper, then you are taking notes in too many places. One Place for Your Notes Choose the solution that works best for you. No time for time management?