Google, a simple word that means so much. It is a site to look up information, but it is also an action - to Google something. Don't know the answer? Google it. Google this and that, everyone does it daily. But Google is more than just a mere site, more than just a word. Google is a treasure beyond our wildest dreams.
Being a history graduate, I have learned to search and find good articles and books when learning and writing about history. And frankly, I hardly, ever used Google. Too many blogs, main steam news, bias, etc. I would go through university library databases, getting the good, meaty, hearty stuff - not the fluff. The information was real and correct. And yet, the same information has been hiding a few clicks behind the Google home page, and I never knew.
Yeah, .gov and .edu sites are much more credible than .org. But being able to search those sites, and by country, learning history from a different perspective, wow. I loved it. I will for sure be learning country two letter codes and searching for history from all sides of the argument now. The grass is just as green on the other side, ripe with information, sources, and evidence. While we have a firm belief in some things, it is healthy to know the other argument; to see where the other side is coming from can really help increase our knowledge on the topic all together.
And for Wikipedia, I have always trusted it. I like it because at the bottom is a gold mine of direct links to the actual source. Wikipedia is smart enough to check out that source and decide if it is credible. So those pages with hundreds of linked sources, yeah, probably pretty accurate and true. Now I won't trust an argument on Wikipedia because it is suppose to be non-bias and open. But with the information available, I can easily form my own opinion from the facts on the page.
One of my arguments for Wikipedia is people have to cite their sources of where they got their information and date stamp it at the bottom of the page. A textbook doesn't have to do that. You don't know the resources that were used to put Chapter 2 together. There are no links to the research or sources...you're just suppose to trust them. So why do we tell students they can't trust something that has linked references that we can follow up on, but to trust something that has no references just because a big company made it and the district bought it? I have a really hard time with that....
ReplyDeleteI totally had my mind blown when I learned about how we could search (using a punctuation symbol and two letters) the perspectives of people from all over the world. And the time ranges! That was an amazing feature that I'd never known about before. As a bio major I never had much use for this kind of stuff as much you may have benefitted from it as a history major. Technology is amazing!
ReplyDeleteI totally had my mind blown when I learned about how we could search (using a punctuation symbol and two letters) the perspectives of people from all over the world. And the time ranges! That was an amazing feature that I'd never known about before. As a bio major I never had much use for this kind of stuff as much you may have benefitted from it as a history major. Technology is amazing!
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