IT @ ISM Tech Think Blog

In a previous post, Fred posted some shownotes from his recent Wednesday morning in-service on web skills. I’d just like to expand on this a bit. If you’re an MS or HS teacher and plan for your students to do research on a topic, you can share the below hints with your students before they start. Effective web searching involves a whole set of skills that need reinforcing over time.

• Students should know what they are looking for - this may seem obvious, but many people do not meta-cognize when searching.
• Consider using the library - we have a lot of excellent resources in our library databases. If in doubt how to use them, ask the library staff for help. (This is probably a good topic for a future post…)
• While Wikipedia may not be appropriate as a source itself, it is often a good starting point. Unless you’re looking up a very obscure topic, a certain - often considerable - level of editing will have been done to the article, ensuring a fairly high level of quality and reliability. This can thus provide a good initial overview of the topic, and includes useful links as a springboard for further exploration. You can usually gain a sense of the quality of a wikipedia article by consulting the Discussion page that comes with it.
• Assess web sites you find by using the five Ws of web research:
  • Who created the site? Can you tell if the author is an expert on the topic?
  • What is the author’s intention? (To sell something? To teach or inform? To convince you of a particular point of view?)
  • When was the site created and/or last updated?
  • Where does the information in the site come from?
  • Why might the information in the site be useful for you? Why would this be a better source than any other source you may find?
• Learn searching syntax and make the search engine work more intelligently. If you really want to use Google, become familiar with its Advanced Search. There is a link to this on the Google search page. You can then decide whether you want to search for web pages including:
  • ALL the search terms
  • AT LEAST ONE of the search terms
  • THE EXACT search phrase
  • the search terms MINUS one or more terms

Image: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/advsearch_new.gif

• Here are a few more Google search tricks. (Note that ‘immediately before’ means there should be no spaces.)
  • When searching, insert the tilde (~) sign immediately before a search term to also include synonyms. For example, searching for ~auto loans will also search for car loans.
  • Use the * symbol, which works as a so-called wild card. This can represent any word, so if you search for Little Red *, you will find such stories as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Little Red Hen”, but also the lyrics for Prince’s hit “Little Red Corvette”.
  • Put define: immediately in front of a term and you will search the web for definitions of that term, e.g. define:sycophantic, to get a definition of that term.
  • To gauge the reliability of a website, it may be useful to see who’s linking to it. Type link: immediately in front of a website address. Thus, to see who’s linking to Kathy Schrock’s excellent website (where I got the five Ws from), search for link:kathyschrock.net.
  • To search for sites with content related to a site you’ve already found, type in related: immediately before the website address. Thus, to find more resources similar to those offered by Kathy Schrock’s site, type in related:www.kathyschrock.net.
  • You can also search for hits within a particular domain, e.g. only within the public ISM site or only within the Carnegie-Mellon University site, by putting site: immediately in front of the website address. However, the search engine Alta Vista seems to be much better at this, so I’ll address this in a later post, Web Searching 201.

For more hints and tips on Google searching, see the links below.

Sources:

5 Ws of web research, by Kathy Schrock: http://kathyschrock.net/abceval/5ws.pdf

Google search tips: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/refinesearch.html

Advanced Google search operators: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/operators.html

Google Search cheatsheet: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/cheatsheet.html