My+thoughts



I consider myself a digital immigrant for I have known a world with very little digital technology or none at all for that matter. I was there for the introduction of the Internet, mobile phones, Facebook, Youtube, etc. For me to see the rapid growth of each of the aforementioned devices was quite astonishing for it never occurred to me how big they would all become.Yet for those like my little sister, they haven't experienced what I have to a certain extent. They were born and it was digital everywhere and even more so now in last decade.

I myself have felt the effects of the limitations of web research. Even with article databases like ERIC, pubmed, Google School, Pro Quest, ect, it doesn't help that much. Sure the articles/sources are more reliable but they sometimes aren't what you're looking for and they tend to be an abundant amount that you have to skim through in order to see in the information is useful or not in your research. Some courses have help in how to navigate through those types of sites and how to filter on your own when searching through sites from Google. Yet any manual searching requires a lot of patience and effort in order to get quality information. One source is now a reliable source is Wikipedia but not all information is on there and you don't know if all the details are accurate but they usually are.

Blogs, videos, podcasts, etc. tend to be biased in some way like all other sources but it is up to you as the researcher/user to identify them and see if it is useful for your research. Yet through the long years of trying to research online, I've built up technique and skills in order to try and be as efficient as possible. I have found that the more specific you are in your search, the more effort and time you need in order to find quality information. Yet, I have found through the last couple of years, that improvements are being made that do help the average user to research more efficiently such as Google's suggestions when typing in your search topic.

I think as a future educator, I will need to try and keep up to date with new technology and software in order to help my students cope with new methods and build skills and techniques to improve their research online. These limitations won't go away right away but eventually they may but they will always be some pros and cons to anything.

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