First day of class...

This is the day that I will begin the journey of juggling working full-time, being a full-time student and being a single parent to a toddler. My hopes are high and I am praying that I have enough makeup to cover the bags that will soon be forming under my eyes!

I already learned quiet a lot upon entering the Internet Detective tutorial. I realized that I have been lucky thus far. Lucky in the sense that I have relied heavily on the internet for my research without any adverse affects. I have never been accused of plagiarism, nor have my professors rejected my work because of badly chosen sources. This does not mean that I am proud of the fact that I have relied so heavily, if not exclusively, in the past year on internet research. I honestly wish that I had found the time to go to the library.

When reading about the process of academic publishing it made me wonder if it's possible to know how the content in web sites have been published. Even on some credible web sites such as government web sites (yes I say credible...in terms of statistical data such as information gathered by the census) it's extremely hard and sometimes impossible to find all of the information necessary for a works sited section. I am forever leaving out the date of publication or even the authors name section. I dream of the day that each web page is followed by an information page that it is linked with the date of publication, revision, authors, where the information is from (including country) etc. Of course even if this was possible it could all be filled in with false information.

I was ecstatic to learn of the search engine metacrawler.com. My biggest frustration is that I know of only a limited number of search engine such as ask.com, google.com, and bing.com.

When taking the quiz I was annoyed to read that "when in doubt leave it out". The internet is a place that raises a lot of doubt in myself. I guess this is a wake up call of sorts in terms of only using sights that I know to be credible. How in world could I ever be 100%! Nothing online will ever be 100% but I will pledge to do the following in an attempt to ensure that I receive information from credible sources.

• Check all web sites on fraud check web sites before using the information.
• Use journal articles and articles found on the ccv online library for all information or to check the information used by other sites.
• Always ask Who? What? Where?
• I will look at the entire web site to assess credibility such as the about us section and any place that lists information on authors etc.
• I will look at the URL of the web site to determine valuable information such as where the information is coming from.

I look forward to delving deeper into the topic of internet search and I feel more confident in my research abilities. I would love to see this tutorial used in middle and high schools when students are using the internet for research. Educators need to take responsibility for the misuse of the internet in terms of research instead of taking the easy way out and merely telling the student that what they found or did was wrong.