I. Research Log Entry – 1 point
There were a number of concepts presented this week:
1.) Which did you know already?
-I already had the general idea of the entire C.A.R.D.I.O. concept before going through this powerpoint, however, I had never actually sat down and thought about it. It was just something that I would do without knowing or thinking about it. I also knew about the whole Boolean searching on how to improve your searches through search engines such as google.
2.)Which were new to you?
-I did not really learn anything that I didn't know before, it was more just having the information presented to me in a way that I had never seen it before.
If you were given a research assignment and you chose the web as one strategy for your search, name three important evaluation elements you need to consider.
1.)C.A.R.D.I.O.
2.)Who is the author of the article?
3.)Is it credible?
II. Research Log Activity and Entry – 4 points
1. What question did you try to answer?
In what ways did Europeans influence the Native Americans?
2. What search engines did you use?
I used google.com as my search engine.
3. What search terms did you use?
1. European influence on Native Americans
2. European influence and Native Americans
3. European influence or Native Americans
4. How many results did you get when you entered your terms? How many did you get when you used "or"? Which set was bigger? Can you figure out why?
1. European influence on Native Americans
Google results-294,000
2. European influence and Native Americans
Google results-300,000
3.European influence or Native Americans
Google results-306,000
The results with "or" was the bigger set of results. The word "or" in my search made the results expand more than the other two searches because it responds to the two components of "European Influence " and "Native Americans"
Evaluation-http://www.nativeamericans.com/Natives.htm
I evaluated the web site on what I believe to be three of the most important matters to take into consideration when looking at a website. These are:
*Authority and credibility-who published the web page and are they accredited or endorsed by a reputable organization?
*When was the information published
*The relevancy of the information to my search
1. What conclusion did you draw about the value of the site and why?
I believe that the site is that it is not only credible, but also has extremely useful and relavent information to my search. And the website is hosted by several organizations, making be believe that the information presented is credible.
2. Having conducted this research activity, what questions came into your mind that you would use to continue your exploration?
When searching for this information, I also began to start wondering about the Native Americans influence on the Europeans coming to America.
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You did a thorough job on this. A brief comment on your search terms:
ReplyDelete1. European influence on Native Americans
2. European influence and Native Americans
3. European influence or Native Americans
The first one is not really comparable to the other two because of the use of "on." I would further recommend dropping that type of word because unless you are looking for that entire phrase (in which case, you would put it in quotation marks), there's no point in including a preposition.
Next, when it comes to Boolean operators, to make them work, you need to put them in capital letters or the system will treat them as if they are words you want to search. In some cases, also, they may treat them as stop words.
In search term 2, you don't need to supply AND because the system uses it as a default and supplies it.
In search term 3, if you had used OR in capital letters, you would have seen much more dramatic results. Here is a search of those terms in Google today (Feb. 4, 2009):
European influence Native Americans
2,530,000 results
European influence OR Native Americans
207,000,000
As you can see, the difference is much more dramatic and shows the concept of "OR is more."