Saturday, April 4, 2009

I google, you google, he/she googles...


You should ask me: "Why did you choose to title this post like this?". And my answer is: "I titled this post like this because with Google you can do really a lot of things".

In particular I think that Google Scholar is an interesting and useful tool. Both for academic purposes like researching bibliography for our dissertations as well as to find books and on-line material of interest.
Yesterday I did a test. I want to make it clear first that I still don't know which will be the subject of my dissertation. So, I decided to search with Google Scholar a subject that interests me and that could probably be the subject of my dissertation. I typed in the search box the words "television and children". I was positively stricken both by the number of results that appeared on my screen and by their 'quality'. With the latter I mean that I mainly found books written by professors and specialists of the subject and documents by university students and professors. This means that they mainly are authoritative sources (we talked about this in my last post).
The majority of results are titles of books but searching carefully you can find .pdf and .rtf documents as well as fragments of books. This means that there are a lot of free online texts on the Web. I love this thing! Free information is always a good thing!

Thanks to this computer tool to find material and to build up a bibliography for our dissertation will be less difficult. We will discover soon if this is true!

:-) Chiara


Photo Source

3 comments:

  1. Hi Chiara!
    I thought about Google specific Search, too. I really find this tool very useful and interesting. I have never known about it, and so I have never used it. During last Wednesday's lesson I've used Google Books and have found many interesting results about the topic given by Sarah. I still haven't used it for my personal purposes, but I think I will! Compared to Google Scholar, Google Books gives results concerning Books, with the aim of make you buy them. By clicking on the link, you will get some pages from the book and not the whole one. But you can easily have an idea of how good the book is for your purpose.
    Hope I will help you.

    Have a nice week end,
    Martina

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  2. Hi Chiara!
    It is clear that you know well how to use all these tools and I can see it from what you write. Your titles are very creative and nice!
    Besides, I agree with you "Free information is always a good think!" and it should be always free!
    Bye bye!
    Arianna

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  3. Hello Chiara!
    I really like your title!!! Is the verb “to google” already included in the most recent dictionaries? :-)
    Yes that’s true, free information is always a good thing! But we must pay attention to copyright and all the kinds of license. From today onwards I’ll always pay attention to it! I’ve already put the link to the websites where I found the images I used in my blog… I noticed that you put the links, too. I thought you had found the image of your last post on Google not in Flickr! lol!!!
    Bye Bye,
    Ilaria.

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